LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OP 
CALIFORNIA 
SANTA  CRUZ 


3-1 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 


PRESIDENT  WARREN    GAMALIEL    HARDING 


ill 


BEHIND  THE 
MIRRORS 

THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  DISINTEGRATION 
AT  WASHINGTON 


By  the  Author  of 
The  Mirrors  of  Washington 


Le  metier  superieur  de  la  critique,  ce 
n'est  pas  me1  me,  comme  le  proclamait 
Pierre  Bayle,  de  semer  des  doubtes; 
il  faut  aller  plus  loin,  il  faut  de*tiuire. 
DE  GOURMONT 


ILLUSTRATED 


G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 

ZTbe  mnfcfcerbocfcer   press 

1922 


Copyright,  1922 

by 
G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

Made  in  the  United  States  of  America 


E 

7*' 


FOREWORD 

''A  BOOK  like  the  Mirrors  of  Downing  Street  is 
well  enough.  It  is  the  fashion  to  be  interested  in 
English  notables.  But  that  sort  of  thing  won't  do 
here.  The  American  public  gets  in  the  newspapers 
all  it  wants  about  our  national  politicians.  That 
isn't  book  material." 

An  editor  said  that  just  a  year  ago  when  we  told 
him  of  the  plan  for  the  Mirrors  of  Washington. 
And,  frankly,  it  seemed  doubtful  whether  readers 
generally  cared  enough  about  our  national  political 
personalities  to  buy  a  book  exclusively  concerned 
with  them. 

But  they  did.  The  Mirrors  of  Washington  be- 
came an  instantaneous  success.  It  commanded 
almost  unprecedented  attention.  It  was  heartily 
damned  and  vociferously  welcomed.  By  the 
averagely  curious  citizen,  eager  for  insight  behind 
the  gilded  curtains  of  press-agentry  and  partisan- 
ship, it  was  hailed  as  a  shaft  of  common-sense 
sunlight  thrown  into  a  clay-footed  wilderness  of 
political  pap.  And  close  to  one  hundred  thousand 
copies  were  absorbed  by  a  public  evidently  genu- 
inely interested  in  an  uncensored  analysis  of  the 

iii 


FOREWORD 

people  who  are  running  us,  or  ruining  us,  as  in- 
dividual viewpoint  may  determine. 

The  Mirrors  of  Washington  was  by  way  of  being 
a  pioneer,  at  least  for  America.  Overseas,  it  is 
habitual  enough  to  exhibit  beneath  the  literary 
microscope  the  politically  great  and  near-great, 
and  even  to  dissect  them — often  enough  without 
anaesthesia.  To  our  mind,  such  critical  examina- 
tion is  healthily  desirable.  Here  in  America,  we 
are  case-hardened  to  the  newspapers,  whose  ap- 
praisal of  political  personages  is,  after  all,  pretty 
well  confined  to  the  periods  of  pre-election  cam- 
paigning. And  we  are  precious  little  influenced  by 
this  sort  of  thing ;  the  pro  papers  are  so  pro,  and  the 
anti  papers  so  anti,  that  few  try  to  determine  how 
much  to  believe  and  how  much  to  dismiss  as  routine 
partisan  prevarication. 

But  a  book!  Political  criticism,  and  personality 
analyses,  frozen  into  the  so-permanently-appearing 
dignity  of  a  printed  volume — that  is  something  else 
again!  Even  a  politician  who  dismisses  with  a 
smile  or  a  shrug  recurrent  discompliments  in  the 
news  columns  or  the  anonymous  editorial  pages  of 
the  press,  is  tempted  to  burst  into  angry  protest 
when  far  less  bitter,  far  more  balanced  criticism  of 
himself  is  voiced  in  a  book.  A  phenomenon,  that, 
doubtless  revisable  as  time  goes  on  and  the  re- 
flections of  more  book-bound  Mirrors  brighten  the 
eyes  of  those  who  read  and  jangle  the  nerves  of 
those  who  run — for  office. 

iv 


FOREWORD 

Behind  the  Mirrors  is  another  such  book.  It 
delves  into  the  fundamentals  at  Washington.  It  is 
concerned  with  political  tendencies  as  well  as 
political  personalities.  It  presents  what  impresses 
us  as  a  genuinely  useful  and  brilliant  picture  of 
present-day  governmental  psychology  and  function- 
ing. It  is  a  cross  section  of  things  as  they  are. 

The  picture  behind  the  mirrors  is  not  as  pretty 
as  it  might  be.  Probably  the  way  to  make  it 
prettier  is  to  let  ample  light  in  upon  it  so  that  the 
blemishes,  discerned,  may  be  rectified;  and  to  im- 
press those  responsible  for  its  rehabilitation  with 
the  necessity  of  taking  advantage  of  the  oppor- 
tunities that  are  theirs. 

When  President  Eliot  of  Harvard  presented  to  a 
certain  Senator  an  honorary  degree,  he  described 
with  inimitable  charm  and  considerable  detail 
that  Senator's  literary  achievements;  and  then  he 
mentioned  his  political  activities,  ending  with  sub- 
stantially these  words:  "A  man  with  great  oppor- 
tunities for  public  service  still  inviting  him. " 

The  invitation  yet  holds  good.  Acceptances 
are  still  in  order. 

G.  P.  P. 

NEW  YORK, 
June,  1922. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I. — PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK.    GOD'S 

TIME  AS  IT  WAS  IN  THE  AMERICAN  POLITI- 
CAL CONSCIOUSNESS        ....        3 

II. — GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  is;  AN  INGERSOLL  THAT 

REQUIRES  MUCH  WINDING      .         .         .21 

III.— GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS  ...      36 

IV.— THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN  IN  THE 

GENERAL  SMASH 61 

V. — LOOKING  FOR   ULTIMATE   WISDOM — IN  THE 

BOSOM  OF  THERESE        ....       80 

VI. — SHALL  WE  FIND  OUR  SALVATION  SITTING,  LIKE 

MR.  MELLON,  ON  A  PILE  OF  DOLLARS      .     101 

VII. — THE  BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET,  AND 

WHAT  is  IN  THE  BOTTLE         .         .         .119 

VIII. — THE  GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR  OF  MUCH 

LITTLENESS 142 

IX. — CONGRESS  AT  LAST  WITH  SOMETHING  TO  Do 

HAS  NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT       .  .  .  .       156 

vii 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

X. — INTERLUDE.  INTRODUCING  A  FEW  MEMBERS 
OF  THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE  AND 
SOME  OTHERS 173 

XI. — A  PEAK  OF  REALITY  THRUSTS  UP  ON  THE 

LEVEL  PLAIN  OF  SHAMS          .        .         .     204 

XII. — THE  HAPPY  ENDING   ,  226 


vin 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

PRESIDENT  WARREN  GAMALIEL  HARDING 

Frontispiece 

UNCLE  SAM'S  CONFERENCE 26 

REPRESENTATIVE  FRANK  W.  MONDELL  OF  WYOMING     44 
LORD  RIDDELL      .......      96 

ANDREW  W.  MELLON,  SECRETARY  OF  THE  TREASURY    112 
ARTHUR  BALFOUR         .         .         .         .         .         .130 

ATTORNEY-GENERAL  H.  M.  DAUGHERTY  .  .138 
SENATOR  JAMES  E.  WATSON  OF  INDIANA  .  .160 

REPRESENTATIVE  FREDERICK  H.  GILLETT  OF  MASSA- 
CHUSETTS        166 

SENATOR    JOSEPH    S.    FRELINGHUYSEN    OF    NEW 

JERSEY 180 

SENATOR  HARRY  S.  NEW  OF  INDIANA  .  .  .188 
SENATOR  JAMES  W.  WADSWORTH  OF  NEW  YORK  .  190 
SENATOR  WILLIAM  M.  CALDER  OF  NEW  YORK  .  192 
SENATOR  ARTHUR  I.  CAPPER  OF  KANSAS  .  .216 
GRAY  SILVER,  THE  MAN  BEHIND  THE  FARM  BLOC  222 


IX 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 


CHAPTER  I 

PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK.      GOD'S  TIME 

AS   IT   WAS   IN   THE   AMERICAN    POLITICAL 

CONSCIOUSNESS 

PRESIDENT  HARDING  had  recently  to  decide  the 
momentous  question  whether  we  should  have 
daylight  saving  in  Washington.  He  decided  it  in 
a  perfectly  characteristic  way,  perfectly  charac- 
teristic of  himself  and  of  our  present  political 
division  and  unsureness.  He  ruled  that  the  city 
should  go  to  work  and  quit  work  an  hour  earlier, 
but  that  it  should  not  turn  back  the  hands  of  the 
clock,  should  not  lay  an  impious  finger  upon  God's 
Time. 

That  this  straddle  is  typical  of  our  President 
needs  no  argument — he  "has  to  be  so  careful," 
as  he  once  pathetically  said — but  that  it  is  sympto- 
matic of  the  present  American  political  conscious- 
ness perhaps  needs  elucidation. 

The  clock  is  one  of  the  problems  left  to  us  by 

3 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

the  Great  War,  one  of  the  innumerable  problems 
thus  left  to  us;  it  involves  our  whole  attitude 
toward  men  and  things. 

It  represents,  rather  literally,  Mechanism.  In 
the  war  we  adopted  perforce  the  creed  that  man 
was  sufficiently  master  of  his  own  destiny  to  adapt 
Mechanism  to  his  own  ends;  he  could  lay  a  pre- 
sumptuous hand  upon  God's  Time.  But  in  peace 
shall  he  go  on  thus  boldly?  Or  shall  he  revert  to 
the  good  old  days,  the  days  of  McKinley,  when  the 
clock  was  sacred?  Think  of  all  the  happiness,  all 
the  prosperity,  that  was  ours,  all  the  duty  done 
and  all  the  destiny  abundantly  realized,  before  man 
thought  to  lay  a  hand  upon  the  clock! 

The  question  what  the  limits  to  human  govern- 
ment are  is  involved.  What  may  man  attempt  for 
himself  and  what  should  he  leave  to  the  great 
Mecjianism  which  has,  upon  the  whole,  run  the 
world  so  well,  to  the  Sun  in  its  courses,  to  progress, 
to  inevitability?  After  all  the  clock  was  in  the 
beginning,  is  now  and  ever  shall  be — unless  we 
meddle  with  it — and  before  its  cheerful  face 
America  was  built  from  a  wilderness  into  a  vast 
nation,  creating  wealth,  so  as  to  be  the  third  his- 
toric wonder  of  the  ages — the  glory  that  was 
Greece,  the  grandeur  that  was  Rome,  the  dollars 
that  are  America. 

And  not  only  are  we  divided  as  to  the  limits  of 
government,  but  where  shall  Mr.  Harding  look  for 
authority  to  guide  him  with  respect  to  clocks? 

4 


PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK 

To  his  party?  This  is  a  party  government,  you 
remember.  But  his  party  speaks  with  no  clear 
voice  about  clocks  or  about  anything  else.  To 
business?  Business  has  only  one  rule — more 
clocks  in  government  and  less  government  in 
clocks.  But  business  bows  to  the  public.  To 
public  opinion  then?  The  public  is  divided  about 
clocks;  we  tend  to  grow  class  conscious  about 
clocks.  And  clamorously  amid  all  these  authori- 
ties is  heard  the  voice  of  the  Farm  Bloc  exclaiming: 
"Don't  touch  God's  Time." 

So  it  is  decided  that  Washington  may  save  day- 
light and  save  the  clock  too,  a  double  saving,  a 
most  happy  compromise.  If  all  questions  touch- 
ing Mechanism  could  only  be  solved  in  the  direction 
of  such  splendid  economies! 

I  listened  a  year  ago  to  a  most  unusual  Fourth 
of  July  oration.  The  speaker,  like  most  of  us  in 
this  period  of  break-up  following  the  Great  War, 
was  rather  bewildered.  He  had,  moreover,  his 
private  reasons  for  feeling  that  life  was  not  easily 
construed.  An  illness,  perhaps  mortal,  afflicted 
him.  Existence  had  been  unclouded  until  this 
last  cloud  came;  why  was  it  to  end  suddenly  and 
without  reason?  He  had  gone  through  the  Great 
War  a  follower  of  Mr.  Wilson's,  to  see  the  world 
scoffing  at  the  passionate  faith  it  had  professed  a 
few  months  before  and  sneering  at  the  leaders  it 
had  then  exalted.  He  had  echoing  in  his  mind  the 
fine  war  phrases,  " Brotherhood  of  Man,"  "War 

5 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

to  End  War, "  "We  must  be  just  even  to  those  to 
whom'  we  do  not  wish  to  be  just."  Then  some 
monstrous  hand  had  turned  the  page  and  there  was 
Harding,  just  as  in  his  own  life  all  success  at  the 
bar  and  in  politics,  and  the  joy  of  being  lord  of  a 
vast  country  estate  that  had  been  patented  in  his 
family  since  colonial  times,  had  suddenly  come  to 
an  end;  the  page  had  turned. 

So  this  is  what  he  said,  in  a  voice  that  rose  not 
much  above  a  whisper,  "I  have  told  them  where  to 
dig  a  hole  and  put  me,  out  here  on  my  pleasant 
place.  I  don't  know  what  it  means.  I  don't 
believe  it  has  any  meaning.  The  only  thing  to  do 
is  to  laugh.  You  have  trouble  laughing?  Look 
about  you  and  you  will  find  plenty  to  laugh  at. 
Look  at  your  President  and  laugh.  Look  at  your 
Supreme  Court  and  laugh.  Not  one  of  them  knows 
whether  he  is  coming  or  going.  Everything  for  the 
moment  has  lost  its  meaning  for  everyone.  If  you 
can't  laugh  at  anything  else,  just  think  how  many 
angels  there  are  who  are  blank  blanks  and  how 
many  blank  blanks  there  are  who  are  angels  .  .  . 
and  laugh." 

The  Comic  Spirit  looking  down  from  some  cool 
distance  sees  something  like  what  this  lawyer  saw. 
It  sees  President  Harding  and  the  Ku  Klux  Klan. 
The  connection  between  President  Harding  and  the 
Ku  Klux  Klan?  The  Comic  Spirit,  perceiving 
everything,  perceives  that  too.  For  it  Mr.  Harding 
is  but  the  pious  manifestation  of  a  sentiment  of 

6 


PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK 

which  the  Ku  Klux  Klan  is  the  unconscious  and 
serviceable  parody,  that  instinctive  rush  of  a  people 
with  the  world  breaking  up  about  it,  to  seek 
safety  in  the  past.  Men  always  shrink  thus  back- 
ward when  f  vcing  an  uncertain  future,  just  as  in 
moments  of  gieat  peril  they  become  children  again, 
call  " Mother!"  and  revert  to  early  practices  at 
her  knee.  It  is  one  of  the  most  intelligent  things 
the  human  race  ever  does.  It  is  looking  before 
you  leap:  the  race  has  no  choice  but  to  leap;  it 
draws  back  to  solid  ground  in  the  past  for  a  better 
take-off  into  the  future.  Mr.  Harding  represents 
solid  ground,  McKinley  and  the  blessed  nineties, 
the  days  before  men  raised  a  presumptuous  hand 
against  the  clock. 

If  utterly  in  earnest  and  determined  to  revive 
that  happy  period,  you  clothe  yourself  in  that 
garment  which  evokes  the  assured  past,  the  blessed 
nineties,  the  long  white  night  shirt;  the  long  white 
night  shirt  supplemented  by  the  black  mask  and 
the  tar  brush  shall  surely  save  you. 

The  Comic  Spirit  looking  about  largely,  like  our 
Fourth  of  July  orator,  sees  in  Mr.  Harding  a  wise 
shrinking  into  the  safety  of  the  past  and  in  Mr. 
William  H.  Taft,  our  new  Chief  Justice  of  the  Su- 
preme Court,  at  once  a  regard  for  the  past  and  an  eye 
for  the  future.  Can  anyone  tell  whether  Mr.  Justice 
Taft  is  coming  or  going,  as  this  Fourth  of  July 
speaker  asked?  He  comes  and  he  goes,  and  like 
the  wind  man  knows  not  whence  he  cometh  or 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

whither  he  goeth.    He  is  forward  looking — when 
he  is  not  backward  looking.     Like  Zekle, 

"  He  stands  a  while  on  one  foot  fust, 

Then  stands  a  while  on  t'other; 
And  on  which  one  he  feels  the  wust, 
He  can  not  tell  you  nuther." 

Glance  at  his  public  career.  He  stood  upon  his 
future  foot  with  Roosevelt,  the  chosen  executor  of 
"My  Policies. "  A  little  later  he  stands  upon  his 
past  foot,  alongside  of  Aldrich  and  Cannon,  doing 
the  works  of  perdition  and  bringing  on  the  battle 
of  Armageddon.  Again  you  find  him  standing  on 
his  future  foot  beside  Mr.  Frank  P.  Walsh  in  the 
War  Labor  Board,  ranging  himself  with  Mr.  Walsh 
in  practically  all  the  close  decisions.  Again  you 
see  him  when  all  the  fine  forward  looking  of  the 
war  was  over,  scurrying  from  the  Russian  revolu- 
tion as  fast  as  President  Wilson  or  all  the  rest  of  us. 
And  once  more  on  his  future  foot  with  Mr.  Wilson 
for  the  League  of  Nations  and  on  his  past  foot  with 
President  Harding  against  the  League  of  Nations. 

Let  us  be  Freudian  and  say  that  the  unconscious 
political  self  of  the  whole  nation  is  responsible  for 
the  selection  of  Mr.  Harding  and  Mr.  Taft.  As 
we  shrink  back  into  the  past  we  are  aware  that  it  is 
for  the  take-off  into  the  future,  and  so  we  have 
Mr.  Taft.  We  both  eat  our  cake  and  have  it  in  the 
new  Chief  Justice. 

The  United  States,  like  ZeMe,  is  "standing  a 

8 


PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK 

while  on  one  foot  fust,  then  standing  a  while  on 
t'other, "  moving  forward  or  backward.  But  not 
for  long,  too  large  and  secure  to  be  permanently 
cautious,  with  too  much  well-being  to  be  per- 
manently bold,  thinking,  but  with  a  certain  re- 
straining contempt  for  thought,  instinctive  rather 
than  intellectual.  Vast,  eupeptic,  assimilative, 
generous,  adaptable,  the  Chief  Justice  typifies 
the  American  people  in  its  more  permanent  char- 
acteristics. 

Mr.  Harding  as  President,  Mr.  Taft  as  Chief 
Justice,  the  agricultural  bloc,  the  enfeebled  Con- 
gress, the  one  million  or  so  Democratic  majority 
which  becomes  in  four  years  a  seven-million  Re- 
publican majority,  are  only  manifestations.  The 
reality  is  the  man,  many  millions  strong,  whose 
mental  state  produces  the  symptoms  at  Washing- 
ton. It  will  be  profitable  to  examine  the  content 
of  his  mind  as  it  was  in  those  days  before  momen- 
tous decisions  had  to  be  made  about  daylight 
saving,  and  as  it  is  today  when  he  hesitates  be- 
tween saving  daylight  and  saving  the  clock,  and 
perhaps  decides  to  save  both. 

I  can  not  better  describe  his  political  conscious- 
ness as  it  was  than  by  saying  that  it  contained  three 
governments — the  government  of  the  clock,  the 
government  of  the  clock-winders,  and  the  govern- 
ment of  those  who  lived  by  the  clock  as  religiously 
minded  by  the  clock-winders.  It  was  an  orderly 
age,  beautifully  sure  of  itself,  and  the  area  of  these 

9 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

three  governments  was  nicely  delimited.  There 
was  only  a'  small  place  for  the  third  of  these 
governments. 

For  the  purposes  of  more  common  understanding 
I  shall  sometimes  refer  to  the  government  of  the 
clock  as  the  government  of  Progress,  and  the 
government  of  the  clock-winders  as  the  govern- 
ment of  business,  and  to  the  third  government  as 
the  government  at  Washington. 

Before  the  war  the  American  was  sure  that  with 
each  tick  of  the  clock  the  world  grew  richer  and 
better,  especially  richer.  Progress  went  inevitably 
on  and  on.  It  never  turned  backward  or  rested. 
Its  mechanical  process  relieved  man  of  many 
responsibilities.  No  one  would  think  of  touching 
the  mechanism;  turning  back  the  hands  of  the 
clock  might  rob  us  of  some  boon  that  was  intended 
in  the  beginning  whose  moment  of  arrival  might 
be  lost  by  interfering  with  God's  Time. 

Born  on  a  continent  which  only  a  few  years 
before  was  a  wilderness  but  which  now  was  the 
richest  and  one  of  the  finest  civilizations  on  the 
earth,  the  American  could  not  fail  to  believe  in 
progress.  The  visible  evidences  of  it  were  on  every 
hand.  His  father  had  been  a  poor  immigrant  seek- 
ing the  mere  chance  to  live;  he  was  a  farmer  pos- 
sessed of  many  acres,  a  business  man  who  had  an 
increasing  income  already  in  five  figures,  a  rising 
young  attorney,  or  physician.  Even  from  genera- 
tion to  generation  everything  got  better. 

10 


PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK 

The  past  had  had  its  unhappy  moments.  The 
American  looked  back  at  the  past  mainly  to 
measure  how  far  he  had  come  and  to  guess  how 
far  moving  forward  at  a  geometrical  ratio  of  in- 
creased speed  he  would  go  in  the  not  distant  future. 
History  flattered  him. 

Before  his  eyes  went  on  the  steady  conquest 
over  Nature,  or  perhaps  it  is  better  to  say,  the 
steady  surrender  of  Nature.  Always  there  were 
new  discoveries  of  science.  Always  there  were  new 
inventions.  Forces  which  a  little  while  ago  were 
beyond  control,  whose  existence  even  was  un- 
suspected, were  harnessed  to  everyday  uses.  He 
saw  progress  in  statistics.  Things  which  were 
reckoned  in  millions  began  to  be  reckoned  in 
hundreds  of  millions,  began  to  be  reckoned  in 
billions.  We  loved  to  read  the  long  figures  where, 
in  the  pleasing  extension  of  ciphers,  wealth  grew, 
debts  grew — even  debts  were  a  source  of  pride 
before  they  called  for  income  taxes  to  meet  the 
annual  payments  upon  them. 

Progress  would  never  stop.  Tomorrow  we 
should  set  the  sun's  rays  to  some  more  practical 
use  than  making  the  earth  green  and  pleasant  to 
look  at  and  its  fruits  good  to  eat.  We  should 
employ  them  like  the  waters  of  Niagara  Falls,  to 
turn  the  wheels  of  machinery  by  day  and  to  light 
soap  and  automobile  signs  on  Broadway  by  night. 
We  should  split  atoms  apart  and  release  the  mighty 
forces  that  had  held  them  together  since  the  be- 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

ginning,  for  the  production  of  commodities  in 
greater  and  greater  quantities  at  less  and  less  cost. 

"We  should, "  I  say,  but  I  do  our  inmost  thought 
a  vast  injustice.  Rather,  Progress  would,  scientists 
and  inventors  being  only  the  instruments  of  a 
Fate  which  went  steadily  forward  to  the  accom- 
plishment of  its  beneficent  purposes.  At  the  right 
moment,  at  the  appointed  hour,  the  man  would 
appear.  Progress  kept  the  prompter's  book  and 
gave  him  the  cue. 

To  a  people  with  all  these  evidences  of  an  irresist- 
ible forward  movement  in  Nature  before  its  eyes, 
came  a  prophet  who  gave  it  its  law,  the  law  of 
evolution,  the  law  by  which  once  the  monocellular 
organism  had  acquired  the  mysterious  gift  of  life 
out  of  combination  and  recombination  inevitably 
came  man.  It  was  all  the  unfolding  of  the  inevit- 
able, the  unrolling  of  time;  the  working  out  of  a 
law. 

Now,  law  has  a  quite  extraordinary  effect  upon 
men's  minds.  The  more  Law  there  is  the  less  Man 
there  is.  The  more  man  spells  Law  with  a  capital 
letter  the  more  he  spells  himself  with  a  small  letter. 
Man  was  no  longer  the  special  creation  of  God. 
God,  instead  of  making  Adam  and  Eve  his  wife, 
fashioned  a  grain  of  star  dust  and  gave  it  a  grain  of 
star  dust  to  wife,  leaving  the  rest  to  Progress. 
Man  who  had  been  a  little  lower  than  the  angels 
became,  by  an  immense  act  of  faith,  a  little  higher 
than  the  earthworm.  The  old  doctrine  of  the  Fall 

12 


PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK 

of  Man  took  on  a  reverse  twist.  Man  had  not 
fallen  but  he  had  risen  from  such  debased  be- 
ginnings that  he  had  not  got  far.  He  was  in  about 
the  same  place  where  he  would  have  been  if  he  had 
fallen. 

It  was  easy  to  turn  upside  down  our  belief  in  the 
Fall  of  Man.  We  always  knew  there  was  some- 
thing wrong  with  him,  but  we  did  not  know  what 
it  was  until  evolution  explained  his  unregenerate 
character  so  satisfactorily.  Still  the  thought  that 
Man  did  not  move  forward  as  fast  as  things,  was 
less  tlie  special  ward  of  Progress  than  automobiles, 
elevators  and  bathtubs,  was  vaguely  disturbing. 

The  Greeks  had  left  us  records  which  showed  that 
the  human  mind  was  as  good  three  thousand  years 
ago  as  it  is  today,  or  better.  We  shut  our  eyes  to 
this  bit  of  evidence  by  abandoning  the  study  of  the 
classics  and  excluding  all  allusion  to  them  in  the 
oratory  of  our  Congress.  And  Mr.  Wells  in  his 
History  has  since  justified  us  by  proving  that  the 
Greeks  were  after  all  only  the  common  run  of 
small-town  folk — over-press-agented,  perhaps,  by 
some  fellows  in  the  Middle  Ages  who  had  got  tired 
of  the  Church  and  who  therefore  pretended  that 
there  was  something  bigger  and  better  in  the  world 
than  it  was. 

So  we  pinned  our  hopes  on  the  Martians  and 
spent  our  time  frantically  signalling  to  the  near- 
by planet,  asking  whether,  when  the  earth  grew 
as  cold  as  King  David  when  his  physicians  "pre- 
13 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

scribed  by  way  of  poultice  a  young  belle, "  and 
responded  only  weakly  to  the  caress  of  the  Sun, 
when  its  oceans  dried  up  and  only  a  trickle  of  water 
came  down  through  its  valleys  from  the  melting 
ice  at  its  poles,  we  should  not,  like  the  fancied  in- 
habitants of  the  nearest  celestial  body,  have 
evolved  at  last  into  super-beings.  We  wanted  some 
evidence  from  our  neighbors  that,  in  spite  of  the 
Greeks,  by  merely  watching  the  clock  we  should 
arrive  at  a  higher  estate. 

The  point  I  am  trying  to  make  is  that  we  have 
been  conducting  the  most  interesting  of  Time's 
experiments  in  the  government  of  men  at  a  period 
when  Man  has  been  at  a  greater  discount  than 
usual  in  his  own  mind,  when  self-government  faced 
too  much  competition  from  government  by  the 
clock. 

When  I  speak  of  government  by  the  clock,  I 
should,  perhaps,  use  capital  letters  to  indicate  that 
I  have  in  mind  that  timepiece  on  which  is  recorded 
God's  Time;  whose  ticking  is  the  forward  march 
of  progress.  Clocks  as  they  touch  our  lives  require 
human  intervention.  The  winders  of  these  clocks 
perform  something  that  may  be  described  as  an 
office. 

You  recall  the  place  the  clock  filled  in  our  house- 
holds a  generation  ago.  Father  wound  it  once  a 
week,  at  a  stated  time,  as  regularly  as  he  went  to 
church.  The  winding  of  it  was  a  function.  No 
other  hand  but  father's  touched  the  key;  if  one 

14 


PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK 

had,  the  whole  institution  of  family  life  would  have 
been  imperiled.  Father  is  a  symbol  for  the  govern- 
ment of  the  clock-winders,  those  sacred  persons 
who  translated  Progress  into  terms  of  common 
utility. 

When  we  descended  from  the  regions  of  theocra- 
tic power  to  those  of  human  institutions,  we  found 
ourselves  in  America  to  be  workers  in  one  vast 
countrywide  workshop.  The  workshop  touches  us 
more  directly  and  more  importantly  than  does  the 
nation.  Out  of  the  workshop  comes  our  bread  and 
butter.  When  the  workshop  closes  down  we  suffer 
and  form  on  line  at  the  soup  kitchens. 

Three  meals  a  day  concern  us  more  than  do  post- 
offices  and  federal  buildings,  of  however  white 
marble  or  however  noble  fagades.  What  we  have 
to  eat  and  to  wear,  what  we  may  put  in  the  bank, 
what  real  freedom  we  enjoy,  our  position  in  the 
eyes  of  men,  our  happiness  and  unhappiness,  de- 
pend on  our  relations  to  the  national  workshop, 
not  on  our  relations  to  the  national  government. 

We  conceived  of  it  vaguely  as  a  thing  which 
produced  prosperity,  not  prosperity  in  its  larger 
and  more  permanent  aspects — that  was  ours 
through  the  beneficence  of  Progress  and  the  im- 
mortal luck  of  our  country — but  prosperity  in  its 
more  immediate  details. 

A  lot  of  confused  thinking  in  which  survived 
political  ideas  as  old  as  the  race,  converted  into 
modern  forms,  entered  into  our  conception  of  it. 

15 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

It  was  a  thing  of  gods  and  demigods,  with  legends 
of  golden  fleeces  and  of  Hercules  holding  up  the 
skies.  It  was  feudal  in  its  privileges  and  immuni- 
ties. It  enjoyed  the  divine  right  of  kings.  Yet  it 
operated  under  laws  not  made  by  man. 

When  it  failed  to  effect  prosperity,  it  was  because 
of  a  certain  law  that  at  the  end  of  ever  so  many 
years  of  fatness  it  must  produce  a  famine.  At  such 
times  men,  demigods,  stepped  out  of  banks  with 
sacks  of  gold  on  their  shoulders  and  mitigated  the 
rigors  of  its  failure. 

And  these  splendid  personages  might  set  going 
again  that  which  law  stopped.  We  bowed  patiently 
and  unquestioningly  to  its  periodic  eccentricity  as 
part  of  the  Fate  that  fell  upon  the  original  sinner, 
and  watched  hopefully  the  powerful  men  who  might 
in  their  pleasure  or  their  wisdom  end  our  sufferings. 

We  were  taught  to  regard  it  as  a  thing  distinct 
from  political  authority,  so  that  the  less  governors 
and  lawmakers  interfered  with  it  the  better  for  the 
general  welfare.  Back  in  our  past  is  a  thorough 
contempt  for  human  intelligence  which  relates 
somehow  to  the  religious  precept  against  question- 
ing the  wisdom  of  God.  Whatever  ordinary  men 
did  in  the  field  of  economics  was  sure  to  be  wrong 
and  to  check  the  flow  of  goods  upon  which  the  well- 
being  of  society  depended.  We  were  all,  except 
the  familiars  of  the  great  forces,  impotent  pieces 
of  the  game  economic  law  played  upon  this  checker- 
board of  nights  and  days. 

16 


PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK 

I  have  said  that  this  government  of  the  national 
workshop  in  which  we  were  all  laborers  or  foremen 
or  superintendents  or  masters  sometimes  seemed 
to  our  consciousness  a  government  of  laws  and 
sometimes  a  government  of  men.  In  any  primitive 
faith  priests  played  a  large  part,  and  probably  the 
primitive  worshippers  before  them  much  of  the 
time  did  not  think  beyond  the  priests,  while  some- 
times they  did — when  it  was  convenient  for  the 
priests  that  they  should. 

When  famines  or  plagues  came  it  was  because 
the  gods  were  angry.  When  they  are  averted  it  is 
the  priests  who  have  averted  them.  When  econo- 
mic panics  came  it  was  because  we  had  sinned 
against  economic  law;  when  they  were  averted  it 
was  because  men  had  averted  them,  men  who  lived 
on  intimate  terms  with  economic  law  and  under- 
stood its  mysterious  ways,  and  enjoyed  its  favor,  as 
their  great  possessions  testified. 

Naturally,  we  are  immensely  more  directly  and 
more  constantly  concerned  with  this  government 
than  with  the  government  at  Washington.  Be- 
sides, we  were  mostly  business  men,  or  hoped  to 
be.  It  was  our  government  more  truly  than  was 
the  government  at  Washington. 

Only  a  limited  area  in  the  political  consciousness 
was  left  for  self-government.  You  descended  from 
the  heights  to  the  broad  flat  plain  of  man's  con- 
tempt for  man.  It  was  there,  rooted  firmly  in  the 
constitution,  that  the  government  at  Washington 

17 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

reared  its  head.  Self-government  is  a  new  thing; 
no  myth  has  gathered  about  it.  It  was  established 
among  men  who  believed  in  the  doctrine  of  the 
original  sin,  and  it  had  been  carried  by  their 
successors,  who  had  abandoned  the  sinner  Adam 
as  the  progenitor  of  their  kind  for  the  sinless  but 
inglorious  earthworm.  The  inferiority  complex 
which  is  the  race's  most  persistent  heritage  from 
the  past  was  written  all  over  it. 

I  suppose  it  was  Adam  Smith  who  made  self- 
government  possible  by  discovering  that  the  things 
really  essential  to  our  welfare  would  take  care  of 
themselves  if  we  only  let  them  alone  and  that  the 
more  we  let  them  alone  the  better  they  would  take 
care  of  themselves,  under  eternal  and  immutable 
laws.  Ah,  the  happy  thought  occurred,  if  the 
really  essential  things  are  thus  beneficially  regu- 
lated why  shouldn't  we  have  the  fun  of  managing 
the  non-essentials  ourselves? 

Progress  ruled  the  world  kindly  and  well.  It 
might  be  trusted  to  see  that  all  went  for  the  best. 
The  government  of  business  functioned  effectively 
for  the  general  weal.  The  future  was  in  the  hands 
of  a  force  that  made  the  world  richer  and  better. 
The  present,  in  all  that  concerned  man  most 
vitally  with  regards  food  and  shelter,  was  directed 
by  enlightened  self-interest  represented  by  men 
who  personified  success. 

It  was  impossible  not  to  be  optimistic  when 
existence  was  so  well  ordered.  There  was  no  sorry 

18 


PRESIDENT  HARDING  AND  THE  CLOCK 

scheme  of  things  to  be  seized  entire.  Life  was  a 
sort  of  tropics  without  tropical  discomforts.  The 
tropics  do  not  produce  men.  They  produce 
things. 

The  Mechanism  worked,  as  it  seemed  to  us,  in 
those  happy  days.  We  were  satisfied  with  the 
clock  and  the  clock- winders.  We  were  not  divided 
in  our  minds  as  to  whether  we  should  turn  back 
its  hands.  The  less  men  meddled  the  better. 
There  was  little  work  for  human  government  to  do. 
There  was  no  call  for  men. 

The  picture  in  our  heads,  to  use  Mr.  Graham 
Wallas 's  phrase,  was  of  a  world  well  ruled  by  a  will 
from  the  beginning,  whose  purpose  was  increase; 
of  some  superior  men  having  semi-sacred  relations 
with  the  will  who  acted  as  intermediaries  between 
the  will  and  the  rest  of  us;  and  of  the  rest  of  us  as 
being  rewarded  by  the  will,  through  its  inter- 
mediaries, according  to  our  timidity  and  sub- 
missiveness. 

It  was,  the  world,  over  the  great  age  of  the  racial 
inferiority  complex,  for  which  Science  had  fur- 
nished a  new  and  convincing  basis.  I  might  main- 
tain that  the  Great  War  was  modern  society's 
effort  to  compensate  for  the  evolution  complex; 
man  wanted  to  show  what  he  could  do,  in  spite  of 
his  slimy  origin.  Anyway,  it  broke  the  picture  in 
our  heads.  Being  economical,  like  Mr.  Harding, 
we  are  trying  both  to  save  the  pieces  of  the  picture 
and  put  them  together  again,  and  to  form,  out  of 

19 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

them  unfortunately,  a  new  picture;  which  accounts 
for  our  confusion. 

But  the  picture  in  our  heads  before  the  war, 
such  as  it  was,  is  the  reason  for  our  present  in- 
adequacy. You  could  not  form  much  of  a  self- 
government  or  develop  men  for  one,  with  that 
complex  in  your  soul. 


20 


CHAPTER  II 

GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  IS;  AN  INGERSOLL  THAT  REQUIRES 
MUCH  WINDING 

How  many  of  us  believe  in  Progress  with  the 
unquestioning  faith  we  had  before  that  day  in 
July,  1914,  when  Austria's  declaration  of  war  upon 
Serbia  started  the  ruin  of  all  that  centuries  had 
built  up  in  Europe?  Most  of  us  have  not  stopped 
to  analyze  what  has  happened  since  to  our  belief 
that  the  world  ever  moved  by  an  irresistible  primal 
impulse  forward  to  more  and  better  things,  that 
the  song  which  the  morning  stars  sang  together 
was  "It  shall  be  multiplied  unto  you,"  that  incre- 
ment is  inevitable  and  blessed.  But  how  many  of 
us  really  believe  that  in  the  unqualified  way  we 
once  did? 

The  world  had  many  pleasant  illusions  about 
Progress  before  the  great  catastrophe  of  1914  came 
to  shatter  them.  And  nowhere  were  these  illusions 
more  cheerfully  accepted  than  in  this  country  of 
ours,  where  a  wilderness  had  become  a  great  civil- 
ization in  the  space  of  a  century  and  where  the 

21 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

evidences  of  rapid,  continuous  advancement  were 
naturally  strong. 

The  first  pleasant  illusion  was  that  modern 
progress  had  made  war  impossible,  at  least  war 
between  the  great  nations  of  the  earth,  which, 
profiting  by  the  examples  we  had  set  them,  en- 
joyed more  or  less  free  governments,  where  produc- 
tion mounted  from  year  to  year,  where  wealth  was 
ever  increasing.  Destiny  plainly  meant  more  and 
more  iron  dug  from  the  ground  and  turned  into 
steel  machinery,  larger,  more  powerful  automobiles, 
taller  and  taller  buildings,  swifter  and  swifter 
elevators,  more  and  more  capacious  freight  cars, 
and  destiny  would  not  tolerate  stopping  all  this  for 
the  insanity  of  destruction. 

Moreover — how  good  were  the  ways  of  Progress 
— the  ever  increasing  mastery  over  the  forces  of 
nature  which  had  been  fate's  latest  and  best  gift 
to  humanity,  approaching  a  sort  of  millennium  of 
machinery,  while  creating  vaster  engines  of  indus- 
try had  brought  into  being  more  and  monstous 
weapons  of  warfare. 

Life  with  benignant  irony  was  making  man 
peaceful  in  spite  of  himself.  His  bigger  and  bigger 
cannon,  his  more  and  more  lethal  explosives  were 
destroying  his  capacity  for  destruction.  War  was 
being  hoist  by  its  own  petard.  The  bigger  the 
armies,  the  more  annihilating  the  shells  piled  up 
in  the  arsenals,  the  less  the  chance  of  their  ever 
being  used. 

22 


GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  IS 

Progress,  infinitely  good  toward  man,  had  found 
a  way  out  of  war,  the  plague  that  had  blighted  the 
earth  since  the  beginning.  What  religion  could 
not  do,  the  steel  foundries  and  the  chemical  labora- 
tories had  done.  They  had  made  war  too  deadly 
to  be  endured.  In  effect  they  had  abolished  it. 
Peace  was  a  by-product  of  the  Bessemer  oven 
and  the  dye  vat.  Man's  conquest  of  himself 
was  an  unconsidered  incident  of  his  conquest  of 
nature. 

Then  there  were  the  costs  of  war.  Progress  had 
done  something  more  than  make  fighting  intoler- 
ably destructive  of  men  and  cities;  it  had  made  it 
intolerably  destructive  of  money.  Even  if  we 
would  go  to  war,  we  could  not  since  no  nation 
could  face  the  vast  expenditures. 

Two  little  wars  of  brief  duration,  the  Boer  War 
and  the  Balkan  War,  had  left  great  debts  to  be 
paid  and  had  brought  in  their  train  financial  dis- 
turbances affecting  the  entire  world.  A  European 
war  would  destroy  immensely  more  capital  and 
involve  vastly  greater  burdens.  No  nation  with 
such  a  load  on  its  shoulders  could  meet  the  com- 
petition of  its  peace  keeping  rivals  for  the  world's 
trade.  No  government  in  its  senses  would  provoke 
such  consequences,  and  governments  were,  of 
course,  always  in  their  senses. 

You  did  not  have  to  accept  this  as  an  act  of 
faith;  you  could  prove  it.  Shells,  thanks  to  Pro- 
gress, cost  so  many  hundreds  of  dollars  each. 

23 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Cannon  to  fire  them  cost  so  many  thousands  of 
dollars  each  and  could  only  be  used  a  very  few 
times.  Armies  such  as  the  nations  of  Europe 
trained,  cost  so  much  a  day  to  feed  and  to  move. 
The  demonstration  was  perfect.  Progress  had 
rendered  war  virtually  impossible. 

If  in  spite  of  all  a  war  between  great  modern 
nations  did  start,  it  could  last  only  a  few  weeks. 
No  people  could  stand  the  strain.  Bankruptcy 
lay  at  the  end  of  a  short  campaign.  A  month 
would  disclose  the  folly  of  it,  and  bring  the  con- 
testants to  their  senses;  if  it  did  not,  exhaustion 
would.  Credit  would  quickly  disappear.  Nations 
could  not  borrow  on  the  scale  necessary  to  prolong 
the  struggle. 

The  wisest  said  all  these  things  as  governments 
began  to  issue  orders  of  mobilization  in  1914. 
Emperors  were  merely  shaking  their  shining  armor 
at  each  other.  There  would  be  no  war.  It  was 
impossible.  The  world  had  progressed  too  far. 
Anachronistic  monarchies  might  not  know  it,  but 
it  had.  Their  armies  belonged  as  much  to  the  past 
as  their  little  titles,  as  all  the  middle-age  humbug 
of  royalty,  their  high-wheeled  coaches,  their  out- 
riders in  their  bright  uniform,  their  debilitating 
habit  of  marrying  cousins,  their  absurdities  about 
their  own  divine  rights.  They  had  armies,  as  they 
wore  upturned  mustachios,  to  make  themselves 
look  imposing.  They  were  as  unreal  as  the  pictured 
kings  in  children's  story  books  or  on  a  deck  of 

24 


GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  IS 

cards.  Forces  mightier  than  they  had  settled 
forever  the  question  of  war. 

And  when  hostilities  actually  began  an  incredu- 
lous America  knew  they  would  be  over  in  three 
months.  Anybody  with  a  piece  of  paper  and  a 
pencil  could  prove  that  they  could  not  last.  It 
took  all  of  Kitchener's  prestige  to  persuade  society 
that  the  fighting  would  keep  on  through  the  winter, 
and  his  prediction  that  it  would  continue  three 
years  was  received  as  the  error  of  a  reporter  or  the 
opinion  of  a  professional  soldier  who  overlooked  the 
economic  impossibility  of  a  long  war. 

It  is  worth  while  recalling  these  cheerful  illusions 
to  estimate  what  has  happened  to  the  idea  of 
Progress  in  seven  swiftly  changing  years.  We  did 
not  give  up  readily  the  illusion  that  the  world  had 
been  vastly  and  permanently  changed  for  the 
better.  As  it  was  proved  that  there  could  be  a 
war  and  a  long  one  and  as  the  evidence  multiplied 
that  this  war  was  the  most  devastating  in  all  his- 
tory, we  merely  changed  our  idea  of  Progress, 
which  became  in  our  minds  a  force  that  some- 
times produced  evil  in  order  that  good  might 
result. 

The  Great  War  itself  was  assimilated  to  our  idea 
of  a  beneficent  fate.  Whom  Progress  loveth  it 
chasteneth.  Instead  of  rendering  war  impossible 
by  making  it  destructive  and  costly,  it  visited  the 
earth  with  the  greatest  war  of  all  time  in  order  to 
make  war  impossible.  This  was  the  war  to  end  all 

25 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

war.  The  ways  of  progress  were  past  finding  out 
but  they  were  good. 

Paper  demonstrations  had  gone  wrong.  Govern- 
ments did  not  go  bankrupt  after  a  few  months  but 
could  still  borrow  at  the  end  of  five  years.  Human- 
ity did  not  sicken  and  turn  away  from  the  destruc- 
tion, but  the  greater  the  carnage  the  more  eager 
were  the  nations  still  at  peace  to  have  a  hand  in  it. 
Still  it  could  never  happen  again.  It  was  a  lesson 
sent  of  fate.  Men  must  co-operate  with  progress 
and  not  leave  to  that  force  the  sole  responsibility 
for  a  permanently  peaceful  future.  They  had 
sinned  against  the  light  in  allowing  such  unpro- 
gressive  things,  as  autocracies  upon  the  earth. 
They  must  remove  the  abominations  of  the  Haps- 
burgs  and  the  Hohenzollerns.  Once  they  had  set 
up  that  brightest  flower  of  Progress,  modern 
democracy,  in  place  of  the  ancient  empires,  there 
would  be  no  more  wars.  Democracy  had  one  great 
merit.  It  was  rather  stupid  and  lacking  in  fore- 
sight. It  did  not  prepare  for  war  and  being  forever 
unready  would  not  fight. 

The  war  had  been  sent  by  Progress  to  call  man's 
attention  to  their  duties  regarding  certain  an- 
achronisms with  which  Progress  was  otherwise 
unable  to  deal. 

You  will  observe  that  the  idea  of  Progress  took 
three  forms  in  as  many  years.  First  it  was  a  pure 
force  moving  straight  ahead  toward  a  goal  of  un- 
imaginable splendor,  even  whose  questionable 

±6 


UNCLE    SAM'S    CONFERENCE 


GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  IS 

products  like  bigger  cannon  and  higher  explosives 
accomplished  by  one  of  its  larger  ironies  benefits 
that  were  the  opposite  of  their  purposes. 

Then  assuming  the  aspects  of  a  more  personal 
deity,  it  became  capable  of  intentions  and  could 
choose  courses  utterly  inconsistent  with  itself  in 
order  to  achieve  ends  that  would  be  splendidly 
consistent  with  itself.  It  made  larger  demands 
upon  faith. 

Then  it  began  to  require  a  little  aid  from  man 
himself,  on  the  principle  that  God  helps  them  that 
help  themselves,  the  cleaning  up  by  men  of  the 
human  rubbish  heap,  the  purging  of  autocracy 
by  democracy.  Human  responsibility  began  to 
emerge.  The  picture  in  our  heads  was  changing. 

Then,  as  the  war  came  to  a  close  it  became 
apparent  that  President  Wilson's  happy  idea  that 
democracies,  being  stupid  and  unready  to  fight, 
would  live  together  in  eternal  peace,  was  inade- 
quate. The  treaty  would  leave  the  three  great 
democracies  armed  as  the  autocracies  never  had 
been  armed.  They  might  elect  to  remain  so  and 
use  their  weapons  as  provocatively  as  any  Haps- 
burg  or  Hohenzollern  ever  did.  Men  must  organize, 
must  league  themselves  together,  must  govern 
themselves  internationally  in  order  to  have  peace, 
which  was  no  longer  an  accidental  by-product  of 
the  modern  factory,  but  must  be  created  by  men 
themselves,  deliberately  acting  to  that  end.  Men 
must  work  out  their  own  salvation,  aided  and  ad- 

27 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

monished  of  course  by  such  perfect  works  of  prog- 
ress as  a  war  to  end  war. 

Men  make  the  attempt.  The  peoples  of  the 
earth  assemble  and  write  a  treaty  which  keeps  the 
chief  democratic  nations  on  the  continent  of  Europe 
armed  against  each  other,  which  provides  endless 
subjects  of  dispute  among  the  smaller  countries; 
and  they  sign  a  covenant  which  the  unanimous 
opinion  of  mankind  rejects  as  an  effective  safe- 
guard against  future  wars  and  which  many  regard 
as  dividing  the  earth  into  two  hostile  camps.  "It 
was  humanity's  failure, "  declares  General  Smuts. 
"There  will  always  be  war, "  asserts  President 
Harding,  calling  a  conference  not  to  end  war  but 
to  lessen  the  cost  of  preparing  for  war. 

Not  only  has  material  progress  failed  to  pro- 
duce peace  as  its  by-product,  but  moral  progress 
has  failed  to  produce  peace  as  its  deliberate 
product. 

And  Progress  is  in  reality  moving  forward  to 
wars  more  deadly  and  more  ruinous  than  the  last. 
Weapons  were  developed  toward  the  end  of  the 
Great  War  capable  of  vastly  worse  havoc  than  any 
used  during  its  course.  And  only  a  beginning  has 
been  made.  If  we  may  come  to  use  the  power  that 
holds  atoms  together  in  the  driving  of  engines,  we 
may  also  use  it  in  war  to  blast  whole  cities  from  the 
face  of  the  earth.  Conquest  of  the  air  means  larger 
bombs  from  the  air.  Greater  knowledge  of  chemis- 
try means  industrial  advancement  and  also  deadlier 

28 


GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  IS 

poison  gases.  Material  gains  bring  compensating 
material  ills  or  the  possibility  of  them. 

Even  the  material  gains,  great  as  they  have  been, 
seem  somewhat  smaller  today  than  they  once  were 
thought  to  be.  In  our  most  optimistic  moments 
before  the  war  we  had  the  pleasant  illusion  of 
steadily  decreasing  hours  of  labor  and  steadily 
lowering  costs.  Men  had  worked  twelve,  ten,  and 
finally  eight  hours  a  day,  and  it  was  predicted  that 
this  process  would  go  on  until  six,  perhaps  four 
hours  a  day  would  be  sufficient  to  supply  the  needs 
of  the  race. 

We  paid  five  cent  fares  on  the  street  cars  and 
were  hopeful  that  they  would  become  three  cent 
fares;  three  cents  was  established  by  law  in  many 
cities  as  the  maximum  charge.  The  railroads 
collected  a  little  over  two  cents  a  mile  for  carrying 
passengers  and  in  many  states  statutes  were  en- 
acted establishing  two  cents  a  mile  as  the  legal  rate. 
We  were  impressed  by  striking  examples  of  lower- 
ing prices,  in  the  automobile  industry  for  example, 
and  were  confident  that  this  was  the  rule  of  modern 
life. 

Prices,  except  of  food  products,  were  steadily 
decreasing;  there  might  be  an  end  to  this  move- 
ment but  we  were  nowhere  near  the  end.  The 
wonders  of  modern  inventions,  and  if  not  these, 
the  economics  of  concentrated  organization,  and  if 
not  these,  the  use  of  by-products,  were  steadily 
lowering  costs.  The  standard  of  living  was  rising. 

29 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

What  was  the  rich  man's  luxury  in  one  generation 
was  the  poor  man's  necessity  in  the  next.  It  would 
always  be  so.  That  was  Progress. 

We  now  pay  seven  or  eight  cents  to  ride  on  street 
cars  and  more  than  three  cents  a  mile  to  travel  on 
trains.  All  prices  have  advanced.  The  standard 
of  living  has  declined  and  we  ask  ourselves  if  it  will 
not  have  to  decline  still  further.  No  one  now  talks 
of  a  six-hour  day.  We  recognize  a  check  in  the 
process  toward  increasing  well-being  at  less  effort. 
Life  has  become  more  difficult.  Progress  is  no 
longer  a  simple  and  steady  movement  onward  in 
a  single  direction.  Like  evolution  sometimes  it 
seems  to  stand  still  or  perhaps  go  back.  Like 
evolution  it  requires  a  vital  elan;  it  is  a  thing  of 
leaps  and  rests.  We  are  less  enthusiastic  about 
it  when  it  rests. 

We  blame  our  discomfiture,  the  higher  prices 
and  the  lower  standard  of  living  on  the  war,  but 
much  of  it  was  inevitable,  war  or  no  war.  The  idea 
that  the  struggle  for  existence  would  grow  steadily 
easier  was  largely  a  conclusion  from  appearances. 
We  were  raising  our  standard  of  living  by  skimming 
the  cream  of  our  natural  resources.  When  our 
original  forests  were  cut,  when  the  most  easily 
mined  veins  of  iron  and  coal  were  exhausted,  when 
oil  wells  ceased  to  gush  and  had  to  be  pumped, 
unless  substitutes  were  found,  all  the  basic  costs  of 
production  would  advance.  Ultimately  they  would 
advance  to  the  point  where  economies  of  organi- 

30 


GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  IS 

zation,  of  quantity  production,  of  by-product 
development,  so  far  as  they  have  been  realized, 
would  no  longer  serve  to  keep  down  final  prices. 
We  were  rapidly  reaching  that  point  when  the  war 
came. 

We  lived  under  an  illusion.  What  we  called  the 
results  of  progress  was  the  rapid  exhaustion  of 
easily  available  resources.  We  used  our  capital 
and  thought  ourselves  rich.  And  we  lie  under  a 
burden  of  debt  made  much  heavier  by  the  weapons 
which  progress  put  into  our  hands.  Progress  had 
not  made  war  too  expensive  to  fight  but  it  had 
made  peace  too  expensive  to  be  borne.  We  forgot 
the  law  of  diminishing  returns.  We  ignored  the 
lessons  of  history  that  all  ages  come  to  an  end, 
when  the  struggle  for  existence  once  more  grows 
severe  until  new  instruments  are  found  equal  to 
the  further  conquest  over  nature.  Useful  inven- 
tions have  not  kept  pace  with  increasing  consump- 
tion and  rapidly  disappearing  virgin  resources. 
The  process  of  steadily  lowering  costs  of  produc- 
tion has  stopped  and  reverse  process  has  set  in. 
Spectacular  inventions  like  the  airplane  have  de- 
luded us  into  the  belief  that  Progress,  always  bless- 
ing us,  we  had  the  world  by  the  tail.  But  coal  and 
iron  became  harder  and  costlier  to  mine.  Oil 
neared  exhaustion.  Timber  grew  scarcer.  Agri- 
cultural lands  smaller  in  proportion  to  population. 

Immense  possibilities  lie  before  us.  So  they  did 
before  the  man  with  the  stone  hatchet  in  his  hand, 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

but  he  waited  long  for  the  steam,  saw  and  drill  and 
crusher.  An  invention  which  would  mean  as  much 
in  the  conquest  of  nature  as  did  the  steam  engine 
would  make  the  war  debt  as  easily  borne  as  the 
week's  account  at  the  grocery  store.  But  when  will 
progress  vouchsafe  it  ?  Converting  coal  into  power 
we  waste  85  per  cent  of  its  energy  in  coal  and  call 
that  efficient.  But  does  Progress  always  respond 
instantly  to  our  needs  with  new  methods  and  de- 
vices, like  a  nurse  responding  to  a  hungry  child? 
A  few  years  ago  we  were  sure  it  did,  but  now  we 
look  anxiously  at  the  skies  for  a  sign. 

We  had  another  characteristic  pleasant  illusion 
during  the  war.  Progress,  like  the  Lord,  in  all 
previous  conflicts  was  on  our  side.  Here  was  a 
great  need  of  humanity.  Surely,  according  to  rule, 
it  should  be  met  by  some  great  invention  that 
would  blast  the  Germans  out  of  their  places  in  the 
earth  and  give  the  sons  of  light  an  easy  and  certain 
victory.  All  the  familiars  of  the  deity  sat  about  in 
boards  watching  for  the  indication  that  the  engine 
to  meet  the  needs  of  civilization  had  been  granted. 
But  it  never  was. 

I  do  not  write  this  to  suggest  that  men,  especially 
American  men,  have  ceased  to  believe  in  Progress. 
They  would  be  fools  if  they  had.  I  write  to  suggest 
that  they  have  ceased  to  believe  in  Progress.  They 
would  be  fools  if  they  had  not.  A  great  illusion  is 
gone,  one  of  the  chief  dislocations  wrought  by  the 
war. 

32 


GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  IS 

What  the  war  has  done  to  our  way  of  thinking 
has  been  to  lay  a  new  stress  upon  man  as  a  free 
and  responsible  agent.  After  all  the  battles  were 
won  not  by  guns,  or  tanks  or  gas  or  airplanes,  but  as 
always  by  the  common  man  offering  his  breast  to 
the  shots  of  the  enemy.  The  hope  of  the  future  is 
all  in  human  organizations,  in  societies  of  nations, 
in  councils  and  conferences.  Men's  minds  turn 
once  more  to  governments  with  renewed  expecta- 
tion. Not  only  do  we  think  for  the  first  time 
seriously  of  a  government  of  the  world  but  we 
focus  more  attention  on  the  government  at  Wash- 
ington. Groups  with  special  interests  to  serve 
reach  out  openly  to  control  it. 

The  war  laid  a  new  emphasis  on  government. 
Not  only  did  the  government  have  our  persons  and 
our  lives  at  its  command  but  it  assumed  authority 
over  our  food,  it  directed  our  factories  and  our 
railroads,  it  told  us  what  we  could  manufacture 
and  ship,  it  decided  who  could  borrow  of  the 
general  credit  and  for  what  purposes,  it  fixed  the 
prices  at  which  we  could  buy  and  sell.  It  came  to 
occupy  a  new  place  in  the  national  consciousness 
and  one  which  it  will  never  wholly  lose.  One  rival 
to  it, — the  belief,  having  its  roots  in  early  religious 
ideas,  and  strengthened  by  scientific  theory  and 
the  outward  results  of  the  great  inventions,  that 
moved  by  some  irresistible  impulse,  life  went 
steadily  forward  to  higher  and  higher  planes,  and 
that  man  had  but  little  to  do  but  pluck  the 

3  33 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

fmits  of  progress — has  been  badly  shattered  by 
events. 

But  men  do  not  change  beliefs  suddenly.  Per- 
haps after  all  the  war  was  only  the  way  of  progress 
—to  usher  in  a  new  and  brilliant  day.  Perhaps 
the  unfolding  future  has  something  near  in  store 
far  greater  and  better  than  went  before.  We  shall 
not  trust  men  too  far,  men  with  their  obstinate 
blindness,  men  with  their  originally  sinful  habit  of 
thinking  they  know  better  than  the  forces  which 
rule  the  world.  We  want  not  leaders  but  weather 
cocks,  who  will  veer  to  the  kindlier  wind  that  may 
blow  when  it  is  yet  only  a  zephyr. 

We  turn  to  men  yet,  we  cling  a  little  to  the  hope 
that  fate  will  yet  save  us.  This  division  in  us 
accounts  for  Lloyd  George  and  Harding,  our  own 
commonplace  "best  we  have  on  hand"  substitute 
for  the  infinitely  variable  Englishman,  adjusted  to 
every  breath  that  blows,  who  having  no  set  pur- 
pose of  his  own  offers  no  serious  obstacle  to  any 
generous  design  of  fate. 

Senator  Borah  once  said  to  me,  "The  Adminis- 
tration has  no  definite  policies. "  And  it  is  not  Mr. 
Harding's  fault.  If  he  wanted  to  form  any  the 
people  wouldn't  let  him.  They  elected  .him  not  to 
have  any.  They  desired  in  the  White  House  some 
one  who  would  not  look  further  ahead  than  the 
next  day  until  the  future  became  clearer.  If  he 
had  purposes  events  might  prove  them  to  be 
wrong. 

34 


GOD'S  TIME  AS  IT  IS 

The  same  fundamental  idea  underlay  the  remark 
of  a  member  of  the  Cabinet,  at  the  outset  of  the 
recent  disarmament  and  Far  Eastern  Conference, 
that  "  Lloyd  George  was  the  hope  of  the  gathering 
because  he  had  no  principles." 

The  war  destroyed  many  men  but  it  half  restored 
Man.  You  see  how  inevitable  optimism  is.  The 
ways  of  Progress  are  indeed  past  finding  out. 
Governments  during  it  performed  the  impossible. 
They  even  took  in  hand  the  vast  industrial  mech- 
anism which  we  ordinarily  leave  to  the  control  of 
the  "  forces. "  We  half  suspect  they  might  do  the 
impossible  in  peace  but  we  half  hope  that  some 
kindlier  fate  is  in  store  for  us  than  to  trust  ourselves 
to  human  intelligence.  We  don't  know  whether 
to  put  our  money  on  Man  or  on  Progress;  so  we 
put  it  on  Mr.  Harding. 


35 


CHAPTER  III 

GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO   BRASS 

UNLIKE  government  by  Progress,  government  by 
business,  by  the  semi-sacred  intermediaries  between 
the  will  to  increase  and  the  rest  of  us,  began  to 
disintegrate  before  the  war;  which  merely  com- 
pleted the  process. 

Let  us  consider  what  has  happened  in  the  last 
few  years  to  government  by  business,  that  govern- 
ment which  the  smoking  compartment  philosopher 
has  in  mind  when  he  says  so  hopefully  of  Mr. 
Harding:  "  They  will  see  to  it  that  he  gets  along 
all  right/' 

The  first  manifestation  of  nationality  in  this 
country  was  the  nationality  of  business.  Before 
industry  became  national  nothing  was  national. 
The  United  States  was  a  pleasant  congeries  of 
localities.  It  was  held  together  by  reading  every- 
where the  story  of  the  Battle  of  Bunker  Hill  in  the 
same  school  history,  which  sometimes  bore  a  differ- 
ent author's  name  but  which  was  always  the  same 
history.  "  Don't  fire  till  you  can  see  the  whites  of 
their  eyes"  and  "If  we  don't  hang  together  we 

36 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

shall  all  hang  separately "  were  the  unifying  bond, 
and  they  were  enough.  We  had  the  same  sense  of 
identity  as  an  infant  has  when  it  becomes  aware 
that  the  delightful  toe  and  the  delightful  mouth 
where  it  is  inserted  appertain  vaguely  to  the  one 
ego.  The  local  factory  and  the  local  bank  sub- 
tended the  entire  arc  of  economic  consciousness. 
There  was  one  single-track  railroad  which  ran  from 
Podunk  to  Peopack  and  another  from  Peopack  to 
Peoria,  unrelated,  discontinuous. 

In  those  simple  times  when  business  was  local 
the  local  factory  owner,  banker,  or  railroad  builder 
was  the  hero  of  his  neighborhood.  It  was  he  who 
"put  the  town  on  the  map."  He  gave  it  pros- 
perity. He  built  it  by  attracting  labor  into  his  em- 
ployment. He  gave  it  contact  with  the  outside 
world.  If  you  owned  town  lots  it  was  he  who  gave 
them  value  and  it  was  he  who  might  take  away 
their  value  if  he  was  offended.  If  you  had  a  general 
store  it  was  he  who  added  to  its  patronage  by  add- 
ing to  the  population.  If  you  raised  farm  products 
nearby  it  was  he  who  improved  your  market.  He 
built  the  fine  house  which  it  was  your  pride  to  show 
visitors.  Your  success  and  happiness  was  bound  up 
in  his.  He  conferred  his  blessings  for  a  considera- 
tion, for  you  were  careful  to  make  no  laws  which 
restricted  the  freedom  of  his  operations.  You 
permitted  him  a  vast  unofficial  "  say'*  in  your  local 
government ;  you  gave  him  a  little  the  best  of  it  in 
the  assessment  for  taxes.  You  felt  a  little  lifted  up 

37 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

by  his  condescension  in  calling  you  by  your  first 
name  and  stopping  to  ask  about  your  family  on 
the  street  corner.  You  were  jealous  of  his  rights 
because  after  all  the  value  of  your  own  depended 
upon  his  use  of  his. 

When  business  figures  arose  upon  the  national 
horizon  they  were  merely  these  local  figures  vastly 
multiplied.  As  a  people  we  called  them  ' '  Jim' '  and 
' '  JaY > '  *  and  ' '  Dan'l, ' '  just  as  we  had  called  the  local 
manufacturer  and  banker  by  their  first  names.  All 
the  good  will  that  went  to  the  local  business  leaders 
went  to  them.  They  put  money  into  our  pockets, 
when  they  didn't  happen  to  take  it  out  of  our  pock- 
ets; on  the  whole  they  were  doing  the  great  work  of 
making  this  country  a  richer  and  better  land. 
Some  who  did  not  conceive  the  resources  of  the 
printing  press  in  the  issuance  of  new  securities  had 
to  suffer,  but  that  was  their  lookout;  suffering  for 
some  was  the  way  of  the  world. 

Business  began  to  be  national  in  the  tying  to- 
gether into  systems  the  little  dislocated  railroads 
that  local  enterprise  had  laid  down  and  in  the  crea- 
tion of  a  national  securities  market  for  the  distribu- 
tion of  ownership  in  the  new  combinations. 

A  new  era  opened  when  Gould  and  Fisk  and 
Drew  started  at  full  speed  their  rival  printing 
presses  in  Wall  Street.  Look  over  our  whole  drab 
political  story  from  the  death  of  Lincoln  to  the 
arrival  of  Roosevelt,  more  than  a  generation,  and, 
if  we  did  not  preserve  the  names  of  our  Presidents 

38 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

in  our  histories,  how  many  names  are  there  worth 
remembering?  Garfield  was  shot,  which  was 
dramatic.  Cleveland  was  a  fat  man  who  used  long 
Latin  words.  He  was  also  the  first  Democratic 
chief  executive  in  more  than  thirty  years.  What 
else?  Who  else? 

Meanwhile  an  amazing  array  of  business  person- 
ages diverted  attention  from  the  inconspicuous 
Hayeses,  Arthurs,  and  McKinleys,  who  were  the 
flower  of  our  public  life.  Gould,  Fisk,  Drew,  Hill, 
Carnegie,  the  Rockefellers,  Harriman,  Morgan, 
Ryan — business  was  fertile  of  men,  politics  sterile ; 
you  have  to  go  back  to  the  foundation  of  the 
government  for  a  period  so  prolific  in  men,  of  the 
other  sort,  or  to  the  age  of  Elizabeth  or  of  Pericles 
for  another  as  prolific  in  men,  of  still  another  kind. 
How  could  the  dull  sideshow  in  Washington  com- 
pete with  the  big  spectacle  in  New  York? 

These  demigods  of  business  were  not  only 
shining  personalities;  they  were  doing  the  work  of 
making  America  great  and  rich ;  we  all  shared  in  the 
prosperity  they  were  creating.  To  go  back  to  the 
small  town  again,  who  was  it  increased  the  oppor- 
tunities of  the  storekeeper,  the  neighboring  farmer, 
or  real  estate  holder?  Was  it  the  mayor  and  the 
common  council  by  passing  ordinances  about  street 
signs  and  sidewalk  encumbrances?  Or  the  manu- 
facturer or  railroad  builder  who  put  the  town  on  the 
map,  giving  employment  to  labor  or  an  outlet  for 
its  products? 

39 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

The  government  at  Washington  occupied  a  place 
in  our  consciousness  similar  to  that  of  the  govern- 
ment of  the  small  town.  It  was  charged  with  our 
national  defense,  a  function  of  such  little  import- 
ance that  we  had  hardly  an  army  or  a  navy.  It 
conducted  our  economic  defense,  against  the  for- 
eigner, with  laws  written,  however,  by  business 
itself,  which  naturally  knew  best  how  it  wanted  to 
be  defended;  you  could  not,  in  your  proper  senses, 
suppose  that  the  Hayeses,  Arthurs,  and  McKinleys 
were  wiser  than  the  Carnegies,  Hills,  Morgans,  or 
Harrimans.  For  the  rest  it  was  told  severely  to  let 
well  enough  alone.  To  make  assurance  doubly 
sure  that  it  would  do  so  it  was  rather  openly  given 
over  to  the  great  men  who  were  creating  the  na- 
tional wealth. 

Starting  with  the  combination  of  the  little  specu- 
latively  built  railroads  into  systems  and  the 
development  of  a  security  market  to  float  the  shares 
of  stock  in  the  new  companies,  business  took  on 
rapidly  a  more  and  more  national  character.  Great 
bankers  arose  to  finance  the  consolidations.  An 
investing  public  with  a  wider  horizon  than  that 
which  used  to  put  its  money  in  local  enterprises 
entrusted  its  funds  in  the  hands  of  the  great  bankers 
or  took  its  chances  in  the  market  for  stocks.  In- 
dustry went  through  a  similar  concentration. 
Stronger  companies  absorbed  their  weaker  and 
less  successful  rivals.  The  same  bankers  who  sat 
in  the  boards  of  directors  of  the  railroads  represent- 

40 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

ing  their  investing  public  took  their  places  in  the 
directorate  of  manufacturing  combinations. 

The  railroads  seeking  the  business  of  the  big 
industrial  companies  and  the  big  industrial  com- 
panies desiring  favors  from  the  railroads  placed 
representatives  in  each  others'  boards.  This  inter- 
locking created  a  national  organization  of  business 
dominated  by  a  few  striking  and  spectacular 
figures. 

The  popular  imagination  was  as  much  heated 
over  the  discovery  of  the  United  States  as  a  single 
field  of  enterprise  as  the  imagination  of  Europe 
had  been  centuries  earlier  over  the  discovery  of  the 
new  world. 

The  psychology  of  the  local  industry  period  car- 
ried over  into  this  new  period  of  national  industry. 
The  whole  country  became  one  vast  small  town. 
The  masters  of  industry,  banking,  and  the  railroads 
were  the  leading  citizens.  They  were  ' '  putting  the 
United  States  on  the  map,M  as  the  local  creator  of 
wealth  had  put  the  small  town  on  the  map.  They 
were  doing  something  vast,  from  which  we  all 
undoubtedly  benefited.  Perhaps  we  could  not 
trace  our  advantage  so  immediately  as  we  could  to 
the  enterprise  of  the  man  who  brought  population 
to  our  town,  swelling  the  price  of  our  real  estate 
or  increasing  the  sales  at  our  stores.  But  what  had 
been  a  matter  of  experience  on  a  small  scale  was 
a  matter  of  belief  on  a  large  scale.  The  same  con- 
sequences must  follow,  with  manifold  abundance. 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

And  the  nation  was  demonstrably  growing  rapidly, 
immensely  richer;  surely  cause  and  effect. 

Business  had  from  the  first  taken  on  among  us,  as 
Mr.  Lowes  Dickinson  remarks,  a  religious  char- 
acter; and  when  by  a  great  thrust  it  overreached 
the  bounds  of  locality  and  became  national,  its 
major  prophets  emerged.  Mr.  Van  Wyck  Brooks 
quotes  Mark  Twain  as  writing:  "The  words  of  a 
proprietor  of  a  rich  coal  mine  have  a  golden  sound, 
and  his  common  sayings  are  as  if  they  were  solid 
wisdom. ' '  How  much  more  of  this  sacred  character 
inhered  in  the  heroes  who  created  nationwide 
railroad  systems,  vast  steelmaking  consolidations, 
monopolies  of  oil  and  coal ! 

When  a  New  York  lawyer  said  of  E.  H.  Harriman 
that  he  moved  in  spheres  which  no  one  else  dare 
tread,  he  was  putting,  a  little  late,  into  words  the 
national  awe  of  the  men  who  had  overleapt  the 
bounds  of  locality  and  bestrode  the  continent  in- 
dustrially, the  heads  of  the  vast  business  hierarchy. 
When  Mr.  Baer  said  that  he  operated  the  Reading 
Railroad  by  divine  right  he  said  only  what  a  wor- 
shipping people  had  taught  him  to  think.  Those 
men  did  not  use  this  half-religious  language  by 
accident ;  they  crystallized  into  phrases  the  feeling 
of  the  country  toward  those  who  had  done  God's 
work  of  making  it  rich,  making  it  successful. 

Each  like  an  unconscious  Cervantes  helped  to 
laugh  our  industrial  chivalry  away. 

How  easy  it  is  to  believe  about  yourself  what 

42 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

everyone  believes  about  you!  How  hard  not  to! 
How  easy  to  believe  that  you  rule  railroads  by 
11  divine  right,"  or  walk  in  "higher  spheres,"  when 
the  whole  unexpressed  consciousness  of  a  hundred 
million  people  assigns  you  just  such  hieratic  appur- 
tenances and  privileges.  How  doubt  in  the  face  of 
all  this  evidence?  They  identified  themselves  with 
Progress,  and  Progress  was  what  ruled  the  world. 
If  you  have  faith  and  if  you  are  fortified  with  the 
faith  of  others,  self -identification  with  one  of  the 
larger  forces  is  not  difficult.  Was  not  what  they 
were  doing  Progress,  was  it  not  the  realization  of 
that  benignant  will  to  the  utter  blossoming  of  chaos 
into  utility  which  was  planned  in  the  beginning? 
Were  they  not  instruments  rather  than  mere  men, 
instruments  of  the  greater  purpose  of  which  Amer- 
ica was  the  perfect  work?  If  you  believe  in  theo- 
cratic forces  you  believe  also  in  chosen  human 
agencies  for  carrying  them  out. 

They  were  more  than  instruments  of  Progress. 
I  have  spoken  of  government  by  economic  law  as 
having  challenged  political  government  in  the 
consciousness  of  the  people.  As  a  country  we 
perhaps  believe  in  economic  law  more  firmly  than 
any  nation  in  the  world.  Wasn't  America  being 
produced  in  accordance  with  economic  law  and 
wasn't  America  one  of  the  marvels  of  the  earth? 
I  asked  a  salesman  recently,  a  man  with  no  per- 
sonal interests  which  would  give  him  the  prejudices 
of  the  business  world,  why  he  hated  Henry  Ford. 

43 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

' '  Because/ '  he  replied  instantly  and  without  hesita- 
tion, "he  defies  economic  law."  He  spoke  like  a 
true  American.  To  defy  economic  law  and  make 
money  at  it  is  like  selling  the  Savior  for  twenty 
pieces  of  silver. 

"The  physical  laws/'  says  De  Gourmont,  "pro- 
mulgated or  established  by  the  scientists,  are  con- 
fessions of  ignorance.  When  they  cannot  explain 
a  mechanism  they  declare  its  movements  are  due  to 
a  law.  Bodies  fall  by  virtue  of  the  law  of  gravita- 
tion. This  has  precisely  the  same  value  in  the  seri- 
ous order  as  the  comic  virtus  dormitiva"  In  the 
promulgation  of  economic  law  our  interest  per- 
verts the  simple  and  just  operation  of  our  ignorance. 
In  the  field  of  physical  phenomena  we  perceive  a 
series  of  uniform  events  and  call  that  uniformity  a 
law.  In  the  field  of  economic  phenomena  we  per- 
ceive a  series  of  events  uniformly  serving  our 
interests  and  call  that  uniformity  a  law. 

These  greater  business  men  of  the  past  fruitful 
generation  operated  on  the  whole  over  a  long  period 
of  falling  prices.  Wealth  accumulated.  You  read 
about  it  in  the  government  reports,  dividing  the 
total  by  the  total  population.  The  division  thus 
effected  was  mighty  assuring.  Labor  was  better 
paid.  Higher  institutions  of  learning  multiplied. 
Libraries  housed  in  marble  grew  upon  every  cross- 
roads. Intellectual  as  well  as  material  needs  were 
in  process  of  being  better  satisfied.  We  were  ap- 
proaching an  age  when  ink  upon  white  paper,  now 

44 


REPRESENTATIVE    FRANK  W.    MONDELL   OF   WYOMING 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

so  cheap,  cheaper  than  ever  in  the  pitiful  past, 
should  lift  humanity  to  a  new  and  higher  level. 

The  evidence  was  conclusive.  These  greater 
business  men  were  in  supreme,  in  conspicuous  direc- 
tion of  the  country's  development.  The  happiest 
results  followed.  They  worked  in  harmony  with 
economic  law,  for  they  prospered  gloriously  and 
one  could  no  more  break  economic  law  and  prosper 
than  one  could  break  criminal  law  and  keep  out  of 
jail.  Until  Ford  came  no  one  could  defy  economic 
law  with  impunity. 

And  law  and  justice  being  two  ideas  that  associ- 
ate themselves  together  in  the  human  mind,  in  a 
binder  of  optimism  perhaps,  like  the  disparate 
elements  that  form  clinkers  in  a  furnace,  they  were 
accomplishing  that  perfect  work  of  the  justice 
which  inhered  in  things  at  the  beginning,  when  tiny 
atoms  with  the  urge  to  produce  an  earth  fit  for  man 
to  live  on,  to  produce  America  in  short,  began  to 
discover  affinities  for  each  other.  No  wonder  they 
penetrated  "higher  spheres"  ruled  by  "divine 
right,"  and  that  "golden  words"  dropped  from 
their  mouths.  Progress,  destiny,  an  instinct  for 
economic  law,  it  was  much  to  unite  one  man. 

Again,  they  were  more  than  this.  Men  cannot 
be  so  universally  looked  to  for  the  welfare  of  the 
nation  as  they  were,  without  becoming  in  effect  the 
government  of  that  nation.  Business  and  the 
government  were  one.  Public  opinion  at  that  time 
would  have  regarded  an  administration  which  de- 

45 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

fied  the  great  commercial  interests  as  dangerous  to 
the  country's  advancement.  Lawyers  like  Mr. 
Knox  or  Mr.  Root,  who  had  proved  their  value  to 
them,  went  to  the  Senate  as  their  spokesmen.  Able 
and  ambitious  men  in  both  Houses  of  Congress, 
wishing  power  and  influence,  became  their  agents. 
The  chairmen  of  the  important  committees  of  both 
houses  were  in  their  confidence  and  spoke  with 
authority  because  of  what  they  represented.  Some 
of  the  virtue  of  the  great,  some  shadow  of  divine 
right,  descended  upon  them.  Among  valets  the 
valet  of  the  king  is  king. 

We  forget,  in  the  great  outcry  that  was  raised  a 
few  years  ago  over  the  "  in  visible  government," 
that  the  invisible  government  was  once  sufficiently 
visible,  almost  consciously  recognized,  and  fully 
accepted.  It  seemed  the  most  natural  thing  in  the 
world  that  the  men  who  were  making  the  country 
rich,  making  it  a  nation  economically,  should  work 
their  will  freely  at  Washington.  We  jealously 
guarded  their  liberties.  Woe  unto  the  legislator 
who  would  interfere  with  their  freedom  to  contract, 
for  example,  for  the  labor  of  children,  which  we 
described  as  the  freedom  of  children  to  sell  their 
labor  advantageously.  Adult  labor  banding  to- 
gether to  arrange  terms  of  its  own  sale  was  felt  to 
be  a  public  enemy.  Every  age  has  its  fetish;  the 
medicine  man  who  could  exorcise  the  evil  spirit  in 
stone  and  bush  was  not  a  more  privileged  character 
than  his  successor  at  whose  touch  prosperity  sprang 

46 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

out  of  the  earth,  at  whose  word  the  mysterious 
economic  forces  which  might  in  their  wrath  prove 
so  destructive,  bowed  and  became  kind. 

Make  a  few  individuals  the  embodiment  of  a 
national  purpose  that  has  long  existed,  unconscious 
and  unquestioned,  give  them  as  you  inevitably  do 
in  such  a  case  the  utmost  freedom  that  is  possible 
on  this  earth,  let  them  be  limited  enough  mentally 
so  that  they  are  blind  to  any  other  possible  purpose ; 
do  all  these  things  and  you  produce  great  men.  It 
was  an  age  of  great  men,  Rockefellers,  Carnegies, 
Morgans,  Hills,  Ryans,  Harrimans,  and  a  host  of 
others,  richer  in  personalities  than  any  other  period 
of  American  life  except  that  which  produced  Wash- 
ington, Hamilton,  Franklin,  Jefferson,  and  Mar- 
shall. They  were  the  flowering  of  the  whole  pioneer 
civilization. 

One  hundred  and  fifty  years  of  freedom  has  pro- 
duced few  free  men.  Perhaps  these  were  all.  They 
may  not  have  been  free  intellectually.  Charles 
Francis  Adams  writes  of  their  kind:  "I  have 
known,  and  known  tolerably  well,  a  good  many 
successful  men, — 'big*  financially,  men  famous 
during  the  last  half  century;  and  a  less  interesting 
crowd  I  do  not  care  to  encounter.  Not  one  that 
I  have  ever  known  would  I  care  to  meet  again,  nor 
is  one  of  them  associated  in  my  mind  with  the  idea 
of  humor,  thought,  or  refinement. " 

Never  mind.  They  were  free  in  all  the  essential 
ways.  The  men  of  whom  Adams  wrote  had  no 

47 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

such  sense  of  their  limitations  as  he  expressed. 
Only  an  Adams  would  then  have  had  it,  and  the 
Adamses  were  not  what  M.  Galtier  of  Le  Temps 
suggested  when,  hastily  absorbing  the  American 
spirit  at  Washington,  he  said  to  me :  ' '  I  am  reading 
The  Education  of  Henry  Adams:  He  was  what  you 
would  call  a  typical  American,  was  he  not?  " 

An  Adams,  even  Charles  Francis  Adams,  writing 
of  that  time,  was  untypical  enough,  to  have  missed 
the  point,  which  was  not  whether  these  men  "  'big1 
financially"  were  interesting,  witty,  thoughtful,  or 
refined,  but  whether  they  were  free.  And  they 
were ;  they  were  so  sure  of  themselves,  and  public 
opinion  was  so  sure  of  them,  that  they  concentrated 
on  the  one  great  aim  of  that  simple  day,  and  did 
not  waste  themselves  upon  non-essentials  like 
"  humor,  thought,  or  refinement. " 

I  have  a  theory  that  we  are  wrong  in  ascribing 
the  poverty  of  American  literature  and  states- 
manship to  the  richness  of  our  business  life.  "All 
our  best  and  ablest  minds  went  into  commerce," 
we  say.  We  flatter  ourselves.  Mr.  Carnegie,  born 
in  the  days  of  Elizabeth,  might  not  have  been 
Shakespeare.  Mr.  Harriman  was  perhaps,  after  all, 
no  mute  Milton,  Mr.  Morgan  no  Michaelangelo. 

These  brave  spirits  developed  in  business  not  so 
much  perhaps  because  of  the  national  urge  to 
"conquer  a  continent"  as  because  in  business, 
enjoying  the  immunity  it  then  did,  they  found  the 
utmost  opportunity  for  self-expression,  the  one 

48 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

great  measure  of  freedom  which  this  free  country 
afforded.  A  jealous  public  guarded  their  divine 
right  from  impious  hands.  They  believed  in  them- 
selves. The  people  believed  in  them.  So  the 
flowering  of  the  pioneer  age  came,  in  such  a  race  of 
men  as  are  not  on  the  earth  today,  and  the  rule  of 
business  reached  its  climax. 

It  was  an  autumn  flowering,  rich  and  golden  like 
the  Indian  summer  of  New  England  culture,  a  sign 
that  a  cycle  was  run.  Adams  sniffing  from  the 
transcendental  heights  of  Boston  wrote:  "a  race 
of  mere  money-getters  and  traders. "  Remember 
the  sneers  in  our  cocksure  press  of  those  days  at  the 
"culture"  of  Boston?  Boston  has  had  its  revenge. 
The  words  "mere  money-getters"  bit  in.  There 
were  other  objects  in  life  beside  pioneering  the 
industrial  opportunities  of  a  whole  continent  just 
brought  together  into  commercial  unity.  Mr. 
Morgan  began  to  buy  art.  Mr.  Carnegie  began  to 
buy  libraries  and  started  authorship  himself.  The 
men  "'big*  financially"  began  to  look  over  their 
shoulders  and  see  the  shadows — as  we  all  do  now — 
where  they  a  little  before  kept  their  eyes  straight 
forward  and  saw  the  one  clear  vision,  the  truth, 
such  as  it  was,  that  made  them  free. 

I  have  traced  that  element  in  the  American  po- 
litical consciousness,  government  by  business,  to 
its  highest  moment. 

"Divine  right"  is  only  safe  when  it  is  implicit. 
When  you  begin  to  avow  it,  as  Mr.  Baer  did,  it  is 
4  49 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

already  in  question.  The  national  passion  for 
equality  began  to  work.  Had  not  Mr.  Carnegie 
confessed  the  weakness  in  his  soul's  fortress  by 
writing  a  book?  Had  not  Mr.  Morgan  by  buying 
art  suggested  the  one  aim  of  pioneering  on  a  grand 
scale  might  not  be  life's  sole  end? 

Mr.  Baer  with  his  avowal,  Mr.  Carnegie  and  Mr. 
Morgan  with  their  seeking  of  the  broader  satisfac- 
tions, Mr.  Schwab  behaving  like  a  king  in  exile  at 
the  gaming  tables  of  Monte  Carlo,  may  have 
invited  what  followed.  But  they  were  only  express- 
ing in  their  own  way  the  sense  becoming  general 
that  pioneering  was  over  and  that  its  ideals  were  too 
narrow  and  too  few — even  if  no  clear  sense  was 
coming  of  what  state  and  what  ideals  were  to  take 
their  place.  Men  turn  from  leaders  whose  day  of 
greatest  usefulness  is  past  and  set  up  new  leaders 
against  them.  Against  the  government  by  business 
the  first  great  national  unity  that  entered  the 
American  consciousness  they  began  to  erect  the 
state,  the  national  government  at  Washington. 

No  one  meant  to  end  government  by  business 
and  substitute  for  it  government  by  the  people. 
Not  for  a  moment.  We  devised  a  new  set  of  checks 
and  balances,  like  that  between  the  various 
branches  provided  for  in  our  Constitution,  a  new 
political  organism  which  should  equal  and  coexist 
with  the  one  we  already  had.  The  government 
personified  by  Mr.  Roosevelt  was  the  check  and 
balance  to  the  government  personified  by  Mr. 

50 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

Harriman  and  Mr.  Morgan.  Governments  never 
die  but  merely  recede  in  the  national  consciousness, 
like  the  old  clothes  which  we  keep  in  the  attic. 
Thus  revolutions  never  effect  a  revolution ;  democ- 
racy is  only  a  Troy  built  upon  nine  other  prehis- 
toric Troys :  beneath,  you  find  aristocracy,  rule  by 
divine  right,  despotism,  theocracy,  and  every  other 
governance  on  which  men  in  their  invincible  optim- 
ism have  pinned  their  faith. 

The  revolution  which  Mr.  Roosevelt  brought 
about  was  the  kind  which  exclaims  loudly  "male- 
factors of  great  wealth"  while  writing  to  Mr. 
Harriman  "we  are  both  practical  men."  It  was 
the  kind  of  revolution  this  country  desired.  The 
nation  wished  to  eat  its  cake  and  have  it,  to  retain 
government  by  business  and  have  alongside  it 
another  government,  as  powerful,  as  interesting, 
as  colorful,  as  rich  in  personalities,  as  the  late 
autumn  of  pioneering  had  brought  into  gorgeous 
bloom. 

Mr.  Roosevelt's  method  with  the  new  govern- 
ment was  this:  Senator  Aldrich  and  Speaker  Can- 
non representing  the  still  powerful  coexistent 
government  by  business  in  Congress,  would  call  at 
the  White  House  and  tell  the  President  just  how  far 
he  could  go  and  no  further.  They  would  emerge. 
A  moment  later  the  press  in  response  to  a  summons 
would  arrive.  Mr.  Roosevelt  would  say :  "I  have 
just  sent  for  Mr.  Aldrich  and  Mr.  Cannon  and 
forced  them  to  accept  my  policy,  etc."  Nobody 

51 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

was  deceived.  Unlike  the  philosopher  who  made 
all  knowledge  his  province,  Mr.  Roosevelt  made  all 
knowledge  his  playground,  and  not  only  all  knowl- 
edge but  all  the  arts,  including  the  art  of  govern- 
ment. 

In  Mr.  Roosevelt's  day  the  two  governments, 
government  by  business  and  political  government, 
existed  side  by  side,  of  about  equal  proportions; 
and  no  one  really  wished  either  to  overtop  the 
other.  We  were  indulging  in  revolution  with  our 
customary  prudence. 

The  human  passion  for  equality  which  had  risen 
against  the  last  of  those  dominant  figures,  the  last 
and  greatest  of  the  pioneers,  and  started  to  set  up 
representatives  of  the  public  as  great  as  they  were, 
was  singularly  fortunate  in  its  first  manifestations. 
It  "found  a  man,"  in  that  most  amazing  jack-of- 
all-trades,  Mr.  Roosevelt. 

If  business  had  its  array  of  extraordinary  person- 
alities, the  rival  establishment  had  its  Roosevelt, 
who  surrounded  himself  with  a  shining  group  of 
amateurs,  Mr.  Root,  Mr.  Knox,  General  Wood, 
James  Garfield,  Mr.  Pinchot,  Mr.  Knox  Smith,  the 
"Tennis  Cabinet/'  to  all  of  whom  he  succeeded  in 
imparting  some  vividness  from  his  own  abounding 
personality.  If  pioneers  from  the  days  of  Daniel 
Boone  on  have  been  romantic,  amateurs  are  equally 
romantic.  It  was  romance  against  romance. 

The  balance  between  the  two  governments  did 
not  last  long.  Government  by  business  was  de- 

52 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

clining.  It  was  being  extruded  from  the  control  of 
political  affairs.  Political  government  was  rising. 
It  was  reaching  out  to  control  certain  phases  of 
business  itself.  The  great  pioneers  of  national 
industry  were  growing  old.  They  were  becoming 
self-conscious,  vaguely  aware  of  changing  circum- 
stances, casting  about  for  solider  foundations  than 
"mere  money  getting,"  buying  art  and  writing 
books,  establishing  foundations,  talking  foolishly 
about  their  "  divine  right/1  about  the  crime  of 
"dying  rich." 

A  race  of  gamblers  came  in  their  train  who  cari- 
catured their  activities.  The  great  figures  who  were 
passing  took  long  chances  magnificently,  pioneer 
fashion,  "to  strike  it  rich,"  to  found  industries  or 
magnify  avenues  of  trade.  Their  imitators,  the 

Gateses,  Morses,  Heinzes,  and  took  long 

chances  vulgarly  for  the  excitement  there  was  in 
them. 

Railroads  had  to  be  "  rescued ' '  from  them.  Wall 
Street  had  to  organize  its  Vigilantes  against  them. 

I  went  as  a  reporter  to  see once  in  New 

York  and  found  him  in  his  library  drinking.  He 
sent  for  his  servant,  ordered  six  bottles  of  cham- 
pagne at  once,  and  after  his  man  had  gone  opened 
the  whole  six,  one  after  another,  on  his  library 
rug.  He  had  to  exhibit  in  some  way  his  large 
manner  of  doing  things,  and  this  was  the  best  way 
he  could  think  of  at  the  moment.  He  belonged  to 
a  fevered  race,  intoxicated  with  the  idea  of  bigness, 

53 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

juggling  millions  about  to  no  more  useful  end  than 
that  of  pouring  champagne  on  a  carpet.  They 
were  the  reductio  ad  absurdum  of  the  pioneer. 

The  public  no  longer  put  its  faith  blindly  as 
before  in  those  romantic  figures,  the  great  industrial 
pioneers,  those  Mississippi  River  pilots  who  knew 
every  rock  and  reef  in  the  river.  Stripped  of  much 
power  and  prestige,  no  longer  looked  to  without 
question  for  the  safety  of  the  country,  that  magni- 
ficent species,  the  great  pioneer,  disappeared.  It 
is  as  dead  and  gone  as  that  equally  magnificent 
species  the  Mississippi  pilot  of  Mark  Twain's  day. 

The  legitimate  succession  was  the  dynasty — it 
was  the  dynasty  that  destroyed  belief  in  the  divine 
right  of  kings — of  the  second  generation,  of  the 
younger  Stillman,  of  the  younger  Rockefeller,  com- 
petent but  unremarkable,  of  the  younger  Morgan, 
more  capable  than  the  rest,  doubtless,  but  compare 
his  countenance  with  the  eagle  mien  of  his  prede- 
cessor. 

I  used  often  to  discuss  with  Mr.  Roosevelt  the 
members  of  the  dynasty.  He  had  no  illusions.  We 
both  knew  well  a  second-generation  newspaper 
proprietor,  a  young  man  of  excellent  character,  as 
prudent  as  the  earlier  generation  had  been  daring, 
a  petty  King  who  always  had  an  aspiring  Mayor  of 
the  palace  at  his  elbow,  inclined  to  go  to  sleep 
at  his  post  from  excessive  watching  of  his  property. 
As  we  would  go  over  the  names  in  the  dynasty, 
Mr.  Roosevelt  would  say  almost  invariably:  "I 

54 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

can't  describe  him  better  to  you  than  to  say  he's 

another ,"  naming  our  mutual  acquaintance, 

one  of  the  many  of  his  sort  into  whose  hands  by 
inheritance  the  control  of  business  has  descended. 

Whatever  the  reason  is,  whether  the  inertia  of 
large  organization  and  the  weakening  of  competi- 
tion have  favored  the  remaining  in  power  of  the 
second  generation,  whether  we  have  evolved  but 
one  great  type,  the  pioneer,  whose  day  is  past,  and 
have  not  yet  differentiated  the  true  business  man 
any  more  than  we  have  differentiated  the  true 
statesman;  whether  that  psychological  change 
which  I  have  sought  to  trace,  that  denial  of  free- 
dom which  once  was  the  pioneers' — the  new  laws, 
the  hard  restraints  operating  now  upon  business 
as  upon  everything  else  and  enforcing  conformity — 
there  are  today  no  Titans,  no  one  stealing  fire  from 
the  heaven  of  Progress  for  the  benefit  of  the  human 
race — unless  Henry  Ford — no  Carnegies,  Mor- 
gans, Rockefellers,  Harrimans,  of  the  blessed 
nineties. 

The  old  sureness  is  gone.  The  great  pioneers 
were  never  assailed  by  doubts:  they  went  straight 
forward,  wearing  the  blinkers  of  a  single  aim,  which 
kept  their  eyes  like  those  of  harnessed  horses  in  the 
narrow  road;  God  was  with  them,  Progress  was 
with  them,  Public  Opinion  was  with  them,  the 
government  at  Washington  was  with  them. 

But  their  successors,  like  everyone  else,  look  oyer 
their  shoulders  and  see  the  shadows :  see  the  govern- 

55 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

ment  at  Washington  and  attach  a  comic  importance 
to  that  bewildered  figure ;  just  as  the  government  at 
Washington  looks  over  its  shoulder  and  sees  at 
New  York  the  government  by  business,  its  tradi- 
tional master,  and  wishing  a  master,  is  unaware 
that  the  twilight  of  the  gods  is  come.  And  both 
see  that  greatest  of  all  shadows,  Public  Opinion, 
the  new  monster  of  Frankenstein  which  everyone 
feeds  with  propaganda,  and  fears.  These  three 
things  were  all  one  in  the  bright  days  of  the  great 
pioneers,  and  in  that  perfect  unity  everyone  was 
sure,  so  sure,  and  the  few  were  free,  so  free ! 

Business  no  longer  imposes  itself  up  on  the  imagi- 
nation through  its  extraordinary  personalities. 
In  vain  do  we  seek  to  recover  the  past.  In  vain 
does  the  popular  magazine  fiction  strive  to  furnish 
what  life  no  longer  does — the  pioneer  ideal,  the 
hero  who  overcomes  fire  and  flood  and  the  machina- 
tion of  enemies  and  moves  irresistibly  forward  to 
success,  who  believes  in  himself,  whose  motto  is 
that  the  will  is  not  to  be  gainsaid,  whose  life  is  one 
long  Smile  Week. 

Vast  propaganda  exists  to  hold  us  true  to  the  old 
faith;  we  read  it  as  we  used  to  read  Sunday  School 
fiction;  but  religion  only  sought  its  way  into  hearts 
within  the  covers  of  E.  P.  Roe  when  other  channels 
began  to  close.  We  beat  the  bushes  for  the  great, 
the  kings  that  should  come  after  Agamemnon. 
Monthlies  of  vast  circulation  tell  us  of  every  jack- 
of -all-trades  who  hits  upon  a  million  dollars.  This 

56 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

one  found  out  how  to  sell  patches  for  automobile 
tires.  That  one  was  an  office  boy  who  never  knew 
when  it  became  five  o'clock  in  the  afternoon.  Our 
faith  requires  vast  stirring. 

To  the  gradual  weakening  of  the  idea  that  busi- 
ness was  all-wise  and  all-powerful,  the  war  greatly 
contributed.  Before  1914  men  would  say  con- 
fidently, "Ah,  but  business,  the  bankers,  will  not 
let  the  nations  fight.  They  have  only  to  pull  the 
strings  of  the  purse  and  there  will  be  no  money  for 
the  fighters. "  After  hostilities  began  they  would 
say  with  equal  confidence:  "It  will  be  all  over  in 
six  weeks.  The  bankers  will  not  let  it  go  on." 

Business  was,  however,  not  only  powerless  to 
prevent  war  but  it  stood  by  impotent  while  the 
very  foundations  on  which  it  itself  rested  were 
destroyed.  One  illusion  went. 

Then  again,  during  the  war  unorganized  private 
production  failed.  Publicly  organized  production 
was  immensely  successful.  Governments  the  world 
over  showed  that  the  industrial  mechanism  could 
be  made  to  run  faster  and  turn  out  more  than  ever 
before.  The  illusion  that  business  was  a  mystery 
understood  only  by  initiates,  the  men  "'big' 
financially,"  was  shaken. 

After  the  war  was  over  the  government  organiza- 
tion for  regulating  production  was  abandoned.  A 
period  of  chaos,  rising  prices,  speculation,  wasteful 
production,  of  luxuries,  ensued  and  then  a  crash. 
One  may  explain  all  that  happened  in  both  cases 

57 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

on  the  basis  of  the  war.  But  business  needed 
triumphs  to  restore  its  old  place  in  the  public 
consciousness,  and  it  has  had  instead  a  catastrophe. 

The  weakness  of  business  today  is  its  division. 
Many  financial  leaders  saw  the  depression  that 
would  follow  peace.  Frank  A.  Vanderlip,  for  one, 
came  back  from  Europe  in  1919  full  of  warnings. 
He  counselled  moderation.  He  urged  deflation 
instead  of  further  inflation.  His  advice  was  un- 
popular with  those  who  saw  profits  from  a  sudden 
withdrawal  of  wartime  restraints.  And  the  con- 
sequence of  his  prudence,  according  to  what  he  has 
told  his  friends,  was  his  being  forced  to  retire  from 
the  Presidency  of  the  great  Wall  Street  bank  of 
which  he  had  been  head. 

Henry  Ford,  moreover,  is  a  destroyer  of  old 
illusions.  He  " defies  economic  laws/'  He  does 
what  business  says  is  impossible.  In  a  day  of  high 
prices  he  produces  at  an  unprecedentedly  low  price. 
He  does  not  cut  wages.  He  finds  a  market  where 
there  is  no  market.  To  lower  his  costs  he  needs 
cheaper  steel  than  he  can  buy,  so  he  manufactures 
it  himself  cheaper  than  the  great  steelmakers  can 
manufacture  it.  He  operates  independently  of  the 
"  big  business"  group.  Mr.  Morgan  sends  for  him 
and  he  declines  to  go.  He  grows  vastly  rich,  prov- 
ing that  all  the  knowledge  the  men  "'big*  finan- 
cially" have  of  the  mystery  of  business  is  no 
knowledge  at  all,  only  rules  made  in  their  own 
interest. 

58 


GOLDEN  WORDS  TURN  TO  BRASS 

And  business  never  twice  answers  the  same 
question  in  the  same  way.  One  week  Mr.  Morgan 
and  the  international  bankers  come  to  Washington 
and  tell  Mr.  Harding  that  American  credit  must 
go  into  foreign  trade.  The  next  week  equally 
"big"  bankers  from  the  interior  visit  the  capital 
and  tell  the  President  that  American  credit  must 
stay  at  home  developing  American  industries. 
It  is  the  same  with  the  tariff.  It  is  the  same  with 
the  taxes.  Business  is  not  of  one  mind  about 
anything. 

A  politician  recently  described  business  on  er- 
rands of  advice  to  Washington.  "One  bunch  of 
fat  boys  with  high  hats  and  morning  coats  comes  to 
Washington.  The  Administration  holds  out  its 
nose  wishing  to  be  led  by  it.  The  fat  boys  decline 
the  nose.  They  are  not  leading  anybody.  In 
deprecatory  manner  they  say :  '  Please  drive  North. 
We  think  that  is  the  way/  They  go.  The  next 
day  another  bunch  of  fat  boys  in  high  hats  and 
morning  coats  arrives.  Again  the  offer  of  the 
nose.  Again  the  declination.  And  this  time: 
'Please  drive  South.  We're  sure  that  is  the 
way.'" 

The  government  strains  its  ear  to  catch  the  word 
from  Wall  Street.  But  there  never  was  a  time 
when  business  had  less  influence  at  Washington 
than  now.  It  is  divided  in  its  own  mind,  it  is  ruled 
by  second-rate  men.  Of  two  governments  that 
have  occupied  a  place  in  the  popular  consciousness, 

59 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

government  by  business  and  government  by  parties, 
I  do  not  know  which  is  weaker.  I  do  not  know 
which  has  less  unity  and  capacity  to  function,  the 
Republican  party  or  big  business. 


60 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN  IN  THE  GENERAL 

SMASH 

WHEN  we  became  doubtful,  as  pioneering  drew 
to  a  close,  that  business  served  a  social  end ;  when, 
becoming  jealous  of  its  great  and  irresponsible 
power,  we  started  to  set  up  an  equal  or  greater 
authority  in  Washington,  we  followed  the  line  of 
least  resistance;  we  did  the  easy  and  obvious  thing; 
we  had  recourse  to  a  one  man  government. 

We  magnified  the  office  of  President  and  satisfied 
that  primitive  instinct  in  us  which  must  see  the 
public  welfare  and  the  public  safety  personified 
in  a  single  individual,  something  visible,  tangible, 
palpable.  The  President  speaks  and  you  read 
about  him  in  the  daily  press;  the  President  poses 
and  you  see  him  in  the  movies  and  feel  assured,  as 
in  smaller  realms  under  simpler  conditions  people 
were  able  to  see  their  monarch  dressed  and  equi- 
paged  in  ways  that  connected  him  with  all  the 
permanence  of  the  past,  a  symbol  of  stability, 
wisdom,  and  the  divine  favor. 

If  the  trappings  are  lacking,  imagination  and  the 

61 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

emotions  supply  their  moral  equivalent.  Of  our 
little  temporary  king  no  one  must  speak  evil;  no 
voice  may  be  raised  in  criticism. 

His  wife,  up  till  some  fourth  of  March  an  elderly 
country  woman  grown  dull  in  the  monotony  of 
village  life  or  worn  with  the  task  of  pushing  an 
unambitious  husband  forward  to  power,  looking 
her  most  natural  when  in  the  frankness  of  early 
morning  unpreparedness  she  ran  in  her  apron  across 
the  street  to  gossip  with  the  wife  of  a  neighbor, 
becomes  to  the  awed  eyes  of  Washington  women, 
quite  ' 'beautiful/'  You  hear  them  say  it  of  ever}?- 
— let  us  quote  the  illuminating  phrase — every 
"first  lady  of  the  land." 

When  Burke  said  that  aristocracy  was  the  most 
natural  thing  in  the  world  he  did  not  go  half  far 
enough.  The  most  natural  thing  in  the  world,  the 
thing  which  is  always  repeating  itself  under  no 
matter  whatever  form  of  government  exists,  is  an 
autocracy.  In  national  emergencies,  in  times  of 
peril,  people  put  their  fate  in  one  man's  hands;  as 
in  the  late  war  when  Mr.  Wilson  was  made  by 
common  consent  a  greater  autocrat  than  any  Czar 
of  all  the  Russias. 

The  herd  instinctively  follows  one  authority. 
The  mob  is  single-headed.  All  the  traditions  of  the 
race  lead  back  toward  despotism  and  it  is  easier  to 
revert  toward  something  primitive  than  to  go  for- 
ward toward  something  higher  in  the  scale  of 
development. 

62 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

And,  moreover,  the  vital  contacts  of  our  lives 
are  with  authority  imposed  from  above.  Our  child- 
hood is  controlled  by  the  autocracy  of  the  family. 
Education  disposes  of  our  hours,  forces  our  inclina- 
tions, represses  our  individuality, and  turns  us  out 
stamped  with  a  uniform  mark,  the  finished  product 
of  its  unvarying  course.  The  single  head  of  the 
classroom  is  the  teacher.  The  single  head  of  the 
school  is  the  principal,  of  all  the  schools  the  Super- 
intendent. 

More  important  still,  our  economic  lives  are  at 
the  disposal  of  autocracy.  We  earn  our  livings 
under  foremen  and  managers.  Everywhere  is  the 
boss  who  says  to  us  ' '  Do  this  or  starve. ' '  He  repre- 
sents to  us  not  only  authority  but  wisdom.  The 
organization  out  of  which  proceeds  to  us  the  benefi- 
cent results  of  food  and  clothing  operates  because 
he  is  endowed  with  a  knowledge  which  we  have  not. 
"  He  knows  about  it  all,  he  knows,  he  knows. " 

In  all  the  essential  everyday  relations  of  life  we 
have  never  been  able  to  evolve  any  higher  organiza- 
tion than  that  of  the  chieftain  and  his  tribe.  We 
read  about  democracy  in  the  newspapers;  once 
every  two  years  or  every  four  years  we  go  through 
certain  motions  which  vaguely  relate  to  democracy, 
and  which  are  not  convincing  motions. 

Democracy  is  an  artificial  edifice  imposed  upon  a 
society  which  is  in  all  other  than  its  political  as- 
pects entirely  primitive.  All  our  direct  experiences 
are  of  one  man  power.  It  is  the  only  organization 

63 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

we  actually  know  at  first  hand.  We  trust  to  it  for 
the  means  to  live.  We  revert  to  it  politically 
whenever  it  becomes  an  issue  of  life  and  death,  and 
even  in  lesser  emergencies. 

So  it  came  about  that  when  we  determined  to 
have  a  government  at  Washington  independent  of 
and  better  representing  the  social  will,  whatever 
that  might  come  to  be,  than  the  government  of 
business  we  had  recourse  to  that  one  form  of  rule 
which  is  ever  present  in  our  consciousness,  the  only 
form  under  which  the  race  has  lived  long  enough  to 
have  any  real  faith  in  it. 

The  new  social  ideal  had  not  sufficiently  taken 
form  to  utilize  all  the  complex  institutions  which 
existed  in  this  country.  Business  was  at  that  time 
intrenched  in  Congress.  It  would  have  been  a 
huge,  an  impossible  task,  to  re-make  Congress, 
especially  when  no  one  knew  definitely  what  pur- 
pose should  animate  the  re-making.  It  was  so 
much  easier  to  find  one  man  than  to  find  many 
men.  It  is  so  much  easier  for  a  people  which  does 
not  know  where  it  is  going  but  means  to  go  there 
to  choose  one  man,  and  by  an  act  of  faith  endow  him 
with  the  divination  of  leadership,  than  it  is  to  have 
a  national  will  and  express  it  through  numerous 
representatives. 

The  amplified  executive  is  a  sort  of  blind  pool  of 
the  national  purposes.  Creating  an  autocracy  is  an 
act  of  faith;  democracy  is  work.  And  faith  is  so 
much  easier  than  work. 

64 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

We  did  not  think  of  it  thus,  as  an  exhibition  of 
political  inertia,  as  a  reversion  to  an  outworn  type. 
On  the  contrary,  we  were  immensely  pleased  with 
our  innovation.  As  usual  the  United  States  had 
made  an  immense  contribution  to  the  art  of  govern- 
ment. We  were  repeating  the  race  history  of 
governments,  as  a  child  resumes  in  his  life  the  race 
history  of  the  human  kind.  We  had  got  so  far  as 
to  evolve  that  oldest  of  human  institutions — 
autocracy,  a  mild,  denatured  autocracy.  But  we 
were  as  proud  of  it  as  a  boy  is  when  he  put  on  paper 
with  a  pencil  the  very  picture  which  his  stone  age 
ancestor  cut  laboriously  into  a  walrus  tooth. 

Our  President  had  more  power  than  the  King  of 
England,  we  boasted,  more  than  the  Emperor  of 
Germany.  The  monarchies  of  Europe  were  obso- 
lete because  they  preserved  autocracy  out  of  the 
darkness  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Our  government  was 
in  the  forefront  of  progress  because  it  had  created 
autocracy  out  of  the  suffrage  of  the  people. 

And  how  clever  we  were  with  the  restrictions  of 
our  written  constitution  with  its  exact  balance  of 
powers,  executive,  legislative,  and  judicial.  The 
Fathers  had  builded  wiser  than  they  knew  in  writing 
an  instrument  by  which  the  carefully  distributed 
authority  might  be  well  reconcentrated ;  as  if  they 
were  the  first  to  use  words  whose  import  depended 
on  the  point  of  view  of  those  who  interpreted 
them! 

Acres  of  space  in  the  newspapers  were  covered 

65 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

with  gratulatory  articles  proving  that  the  dominat- 
ing executive  was  the  inevitable  unifying  principle 
in  our  disjointed  and  not  otherwise  workable 
government. 

Ours  was  a  government  by  parties,  so  the  argu- 
ment ran,  and  the  President  was  the  head  of  his 
party.  As  a  matter  of  fact  the  writers  of  the  Con- 
stitution had  not  conceived  of  a  government  by 
parties.  What  they  had  in  mind  was  what  they 
had  before  them  in  the  Constitutional  Convention 
of  which  they  were  a  part,  a  government  by  the 
best  and  ablest  men  of  the  community,  who  should 
meet  together  and  select  the  executive ;  who  should 
equally  through  the  state  legislature  choose  the 
Senators.  The  r61e  of  job  brokers  was  the  last  thing 
they  imagined  themselves  to  be  creating.  Parties 
came  later.  Ours  was  not  originally  a  government 
of  parties.  It  is  hardly  a  government  by  parties 
today.  So  there  was  nothing  inevitable  about  this 
great  reason  why  the  Executive  should  be  the  ele- 
ment in  our  system  which  would  hold  it  together 
and  make  it  work. 

Nor  until  the  beginning  of  this  century  did  it 
ever  occur  to  us  that  the  President  was  the  head  of 
his  party.  The  control  of  the  organization  had 
been  in  other  hands,  in  Hanna's  or  Quay's  or 
Cameron's,  or  divided  among  a  group  of  men  like 
these  three,  who  represented  the  interests  of  busi- 
ness in  the  parties,  and  often  also  in  the  Senate. 

The  idea  that  the  executive  was  the  party's  head 

66 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

was  merely  a  happy  afterthought  which  was 
adopted  to  justify  the  resort  to  the  line  of  least 
resistance  in  creating  a  stronger  government  at 
Washington,  the  concentration  upon  one  man  to 
represent  the  national  will.  We  had  simply  done 
what  other  peoples  had  so  often  done  in  the  history 
of  mankind.  When  the  English  wished  to  weaken 
the  rule  of  the  great  barons  they  magnified  the  office 
of  the  King.  When  we  wished  to  get  away  from 
the  rule  of  the  barons  of  business  we  magnified  the 
office  of  our  elective  King,  the  President.  We 
invented  new  reasons  for  an  old  expedient. 

And  by  making  the  amplified  executive  the  head 
of  his  party,  which  we  did — for  the  Quays  and 
Hannas  speedily  disappeared  under  the  new  order 
and  left  no  successors — we  set  him  to  sawing  off  the 
limb  on  which  he  sat.  If  his  authority  rested  on 
that  of  his  party  then  to  be  firm  the  authority  of 
the  party  must  be  firm.  For  parties  to  endure  and 
be  strong  there  must  be  a  certain  quality  of  perma- 
nence about  them.  They  must  not  rest  upon 
personalities  but  on  principles  and  jobs,  principles 
for  the  disinterested  and  for  those  whose  interests 
are  expressed  in  the  principles,  and  jobs  for  those 
whose  interests  are  less  large  and  indirect. 

Of  parties  with  the  executive  as  their  head  noth- 
ing remained  but  their  name.  The  only  nexus 
there  could  be  between  the  executive  and  the  mass 
of  voters  was  personal.  One  year  a  party  was 
Roosevelt,  the  next  year  it  was  Taft  and  the  dis- 

67 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

tance  between  Roosevelt  and  Taf  t  was  the  distance 
between  East  and  West.  A  little  later  it  even 
changed  its  name  and  voted  in  another  column  be- 
cause Roosevelt  had  adopted  a  new  party  name  and 
gone  unto  a  new  column.  Four  years  later  it  split 
up  and  much  of  it  went  to  Wilson,  who  temporarily 
rallied  a  personal  following  just  as  Roosevelt  had 
done. 

And  because  the  dispensing  of  jobs  was  an  un- 
seemly occupation  for  the  executive  we  reduced  by 
law  the  patronage  that  was  available  for  the  susten- 
ance of  parties.  Thus  we  substituted  personal 
caprice  for  the  permanency  of  parties  and  at  the 
same  time  cut  down  the  practical  means  of  holding 
organizations  together.  At  the  same  time  the 
decay  of  government  by  business  left  parties  no 
longer  an  instrument  of  the  economic  will  of  the 
nation. 

Thus  the  executive  headship  was  wholly  incon- 
sistent with  government  by  parties,  upon  which  our 
magnified  President  was  supposed  to  rest.  A  fur- 
ther inconsistency  was  that  we  adopted  another 
theory  for  strengthening  one  man  power.  This 
was  that  the  President  was  the  leader  of  the  people. 
Have  we  a  government  by  parties  there?  Not  at 
all ;  the  power  of  the  executive  rests  upon  something 
outside  of  and  superior  to  parties. 

If  the  legislative  did  not  respond  to  pressure  he 
might  "go  to  the  people,"  as  it  was  called,  through 
the  newspapers  and  upon  the  stump.  He  might 

68 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

discipline  the  recalcitrant  by  stirring  up  public 
sentiment  against  them.  He  might  build  up  a 
personal  following  to  such  an  extent  that  his  party 
must  have  it  in  order  to  win.  He  might  encourage 
the  movement  away  from  parties  by  attaching 
people  to  ideas  and  measures,  policies  that  the 
party  had  declined  to  accept.  In  this  theory  of 
executive  power  it  was  conceded  that  parties  were 
not  to  be  trusted.  In  the  other  it  was  held  that 
they  were  a  necessary  link  between  the  dissociate 
branches  of  government. 

It  is  no  exaggerated  notion  that  executive  con- 
trol of  parties  contributed  to  the  disintegration  of 
party  government.  It  is  nothing  more  than  a  state- 
ment of  what  actually  happened.  Roosevelt  broke 
up  the  Republican  party  nationally.  He  left  it 
with  its  name  covering  an  agglomeration  of  groups 
and  blocs  and  personal  followings,  supporters  of 
various  interests  difficult  to  reconcile,  whose  votes 
fluctuate  from  year  to  year. 

Mr.  Hughes,  the  same  kind  of  executive  and 
party  leader  as  governor  of  New  York,  left  the 
Republicans  of  that  state  in  the  hands  of  the  little 
local  banditti.  Mr.  La  Follette,  following  the  same 
methods  as  Governor  of  Wisconsin,  left  no  one  in 
that  state  definitely  a  Republican  or  a  Democrat. 
Every  voter  there  is  the  personal  follower  of  some 
chieftain. 

And  what  virtue  is  there  in  the  theory  that  the 
Executive  alone  represents  the  national  point  of 

69 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

view,  that  he  alone  speaks  "for  the  country?" 
Political  inertia  always  finds  good  excuses. 

There  are  reasons  why  the  President  should  try  to 
represent  the  country  as  a  whole,  since  he  is  elected 
in  a  nationwide  balloting.  But  there  is  no  reason 
why  he  should  succeed  in  representing  the  country 
as  a  whole,  why  he  should  have  a  national  point  of 
view. 

Why  should  Mr.  Harding  have  a  vast  under- 
standing of  national  problems  and  a  clear  sense  of 
the  country's  will?  A  little  while  ago  he  was  a 
Senator,  and  the  supposition  that  the  Executive 
alone  has  the  national  point  of  view  implies  that 
a  Senator  has  not  that  point  of  view.  Mr.  Harding 
is  chosen  President  and  immediately  upon  his 
election  by  some  magic  virtue  of  his  office  he  is 
endowed  with  insight  and  imagination  which  he  did 
not  possess  as  Senator. 

Mr.  Harding  is  a  good  average  President,  a 
typical  President,  whether  of  the  United  States  or 
of  a  business  corporation,  just  the  kind  of  man 
to  put  at  the  head  of  a  going  concern  where  a 
plodding  kind  of  safeness  is  required  of  the  execu- 
tive. We  shall  do  well,  should  our  standards  of 
public  life  remain  what  they  are,  if  we  have  three 
Presidents  superior  to  Mr.  Harding  in  energy  or 
originality  of  mind,  during  the  whole  of  the  coming 
century.  But  why  should  Mr.  Harding  understand 
or  represent  the  national  point  of  view? 

Mr.  Harding  lived  his  life  in  the  indolent  com- 

70 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

fortable  mental  atmosphere  of  a  small  town.  His 
horizon  was  narrow  and  there  was  no  force  in  him 
which  made  him  seek  to  widen  it.  His  public  ex- 
perience before  coming  to  Washington  consisted 
of  brief  service  in  the  Ohio  State  legislature  and  a 
term  as  Lieutenant-Governor  of  Ohio.  His  service 
in  the  Senate  at  Washington  was  short  and  it  was 
beginner's  work,  undertaken  in  the  spirit  of  a  man 
who  finds  the  upper  house  a  pleasant  place  in  which 
to  pass  the  latter  years  of  a  never  strenuous  life. 

His  point  of  view  on  national  problems  was  a 
second-hand  point  of  view.  He  knew  about  them 
what  his  party  had  said  about  them,  in  its  plat- 
forms, on  the  stump,  in  the  press.  He  accepted  the 
accepted  opinions.  No  magic  wrought  by  election 
to  the  Presidency  could  make  of  him  or  of  anyone 
else  a  great  representative  of  the  national  purpose 
or  endow  him  or  anyone  else  with  deep  understand- 
ing of  national  problems. 

Of  recent  Presidents  Mr.  Taf  t  failed  so  completely 
to  understand  his  people  and  express  its  will  that 
after  four  years  in  office  he  could  command  the 
support  of  only  two  states  when  seeking  re-elec- 
tion. Mr.  Wilson  after  four  years  had  so  far  failed 
that  only  the  incredible  stupidity  of  his  opponents 
enabled  him  to  succeed  himself;  and  again  so  far, 
that  his  second  term  ended  in  a  tragedy.  The 
floundering  of  Mr.  Harding  is  apparent  to  every 
eye. 

Only  under  two  Presidents  has  the  theory  of 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

executive  domination  of  the  Government  suc- 
ceeded, and  not  completely  under  them.  Congress 
rose  against  Mr.  Roosevelt  in  the  last  year  or  two 
of  his  administration.  Congress  was  not  of  Mr. 
Wilson's  party,  and  was  thus  out  of  his  control  in 
the  last  two  years  of  his  administration.  Mr.  Taft 
lacked  the  will  to  rule.  Mr.  Harding  is  feebler 
than  Mr.  Taft,  and  party  authority,  one  of  the 
pillars  of  executive  power  and  responsibility,  is  now 
completely  broken  down.  A  system  which  is  suc- 
cessful only  half  the  time  cannot  be  called  workable. 

Let  us  examine  the  circumstances  under  which 
the  Executive  was  able  to  prevail  over  Congress  and 
effect  a  limited  sort  of  one  man  government.  They 
are  not  likely  soon  to  repeat  themselves. 

Mr.  Roosevelt  was  an  extraordinary  personality. 
Only  Andrew  Jackson,  among  our  Presidents,  was 
as  picturesque  as  he,  only  Andrew  Jackson  had  a 
popular  following  comparable  to  his. 

Both  of  them  represented  strong  democratic 
movements, — Jackson  the  extrusion  of  the  landed 
aristocracy,  in  favor  of  the  masses,  from  their 
preferred  position  in  our  political  life ;  Mr.  Roose- 
velt, the  similar  extrusion  of  the  business  aristo- 
cracy, in  favor  of  the  masses  from  the  preferred 
position  they  had  gained  in  our  political  life.  Like 
agitations  of  the  political  depths,  finding  expression 
in  personalities  as  unusual  as  those  of  Jackson  and 
Roosevelt,  will  give  us  from  time  to  time  executives 
who  may  carry  everything  before  them;  but  only 

72 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

emergencies  like  this  and  one  other  will  make  the 
President  supreme. 

And  even  then  it  is  easy  to  overstate  the  power 
of  the  Executive  as  it  was  exercised  by  Mr.  Roose- 
velt. The  Colonel  lived  by  picturesque  exaggera- 
tion. If  he  went  to  South  America  it  was  to 
discover  a  river  and  find  animals  that  the  eye  of  man 
never  rested  on  before  or  since.  He  read  more 
books  than  it  was  humanly  possible  to  read  and  not 
become  a  pallid  bookworm.  He  pursued  more 
interests  than  mere  man  can  have.  He  exercised 
daily  as  only  a  pugilist  exercises  briefly  when  in 
training. 

He  had  the  gusto  of  the  greatest  amateur  of  all 
time  and  enjoyed  the  immunity  which  is  always 
granted  to  amateurs,  that  of  never  being  measured 
by  professional  standards.  V  hen  you  might  have 
been  noting  a  weakness  in  one  direction  he  was 
diverting  you  by  an  enormous  exhibition  of  versa- 
tility in  another.  He  had  the  capacity  of  seeming, 
and  the  semblance  was  never  penetrated.  He 
seemed  to  bestride  Washington  like  a  Colossus. 
Actually  his  rule  was  one  long  compromise  with 
Aldrich  and  Cannon,  the  business  leaders  of  Con- 
gress, which  he  represented  as  a  glorious  triumph 
over  them. 

One  man  government  was  developed  much 
further  under  Mr.  Wilson  than  under  Mr.  Roose- 
velt. Mr.  Harding's  predecessor  entered  office  as 
the  expression  of  that  movement  toward  a  govern- 

73 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

ment  based  on  numbers  rather  than  on  wealth, 
which  the  Colonel  had  so  imperfectly  effected. 
There  had  been  a  reaction  under  Taf t ;  there  was  a 
new  determination  under  Wilson,  and  a  new  con- 
centration on  the  executive. 

Poor,  bookish,  without  the  friendships  in  the 
business  world  which  Mr.  Roosevelt  had  had, 
having  few  contacts  with  life,  Mr.  Wilson  embraced 
the  idea  of  putting  business  in  its  place  passion- 
ately, where  Mr.  Roosevelt  played  with  it  as  he 
played  with  everything  else. 

Mr.  Wilson  was  by  temperament  an  autocrat. 
An  illustration  of  how  personal  was  his  government 
was  his  treatment  of  his  enemies.  His  bitterness 
against  Huntington  Wilson,  the  Republican  Am- 
bassador to  Mexico,  is  well  known.  A  year  or  two 
after  the  dispute  was  over,  Huntington  Wilson's 
son  came  up  for  examination  to  enter  the  Consular 
service.  He  passed  at  the  top  of  the  list.  President 
Wilson  heard  of  his  success  and  directed  that  he 
should  receive  no  appointment.  He  carried  his 
enmity  to  the  second  generation.  The  law  which 
would  have  given  young  Mr.  Wilson  a  place  meant 
nothing  under  his  personal  government. 

As  Anatole  France  says  of  Robespierre,  he 
' '  etait  optimiste  qui  croyait  d  la  vertue. ' '  Those  who 
are  "optimists  and  believe  in  virtue,"  remarks  the 
French  author,  end  by  killing  men.  Wilson  in  a 
revolution  would  have  conducted  a  Terror,  as 
indeed  during  the  war  he  did  conduct  a  sort  of 

74 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

legal  terror  among  pacifists  and  radicals.  Roose- 
velt belonged  to  the  other  school  in  the  conduct  of 
affairs  which  Anatole  France  praises  because  it 
never  forgets  that  men  are  "des  mauvais  singes" 
In  a  revolution  Roosevelt  would  have  cut  off  no 
more  heads  than  would  be  necessary  to  make  a 
good  show. 

Moreover,  when  Mr.  Wilson  entered  office  his 
party  had  been  long  out  of  power.  Its  leaders  in 
the  House  and  Senate  were  not  firmly  established. 
Unlike  Cannon  and  Aldrich,  of  the  Roosevelt  day, 
they  did  not  represent  business  in  the  national  legis- 
lature. They  had  no  authority  except  the  purely 
factitious  authority  created  by  the  accident  of 
seniority.  They  were  easily  dominated  from  the 
White  House. 

Coming  into  power  at  such  a  moment,  possessing 
such  a  temperament,  representing  such  a  popular 
movement,  Mr.  Wilson  readily  became  the  most 
perfect  example  of  the  concentrated  executive  that 
we  have  yet  had.  But  even  his  one  man  govern- 
ment was  attacked  from  the  outset.  His  personality 
proved  repellent.  An  intellectual  is  so  unfamil- 
iar an  object  in  America  as  to  seem  almost  a  mon- 
strosity, and  his  ascendancy  would  not  have  lasted 
beyond  two  years  if  the  war  had  not  come. 

War  is  the  other  great  cause  that  leads  to  auto- 
cracy in  popular  governments.  In  times  of  common 
danger  we  revert  to  the  herd  with  the  single  leader- 
ship. We  resort  to  the  only  form  of  rule  of  which 

75 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

we  have  any  experience  in  our  daily  lives,  the  only 
form  in  which  the  race  has  yet  developed  any  last- 
ing faith.  From  the  time  when  war  threatened, 
with  the  invasion  of  Belgium,  till  the  time  when 
it  ended  with  the  armistice,  Mr.  Wilson  became 
what  any  President  may  become  under  like 
circumstances,  what  Mr.  Wilson's  temperament 
especially  fitted  him  to  become — an  absolute 
dictator. 

When  we  think  of  the  powerful  executive  as  the 
natural  development  of  the  American  system,  im- 
parting that  unity  to  our  government  which  the 
makers  of  the  Constitution  in  their  zeal  for  checks 
and  balances  refused  to  give  it,  we  are  over- 
impressed  by  the  phenomena  of  Roosevelt  and  Wil- 
son and  do  not  make  sufficient  allowances  for  the 
conditions  which  made  their  power  inevitable.  So 
impossible  is  it  for  authority  to  remain  permanently 
in  the  hands  of  the  executive  that  we  are  now  wit- 
nessing its  spontaneous  movement  away  from  the 
White  House — toward,  well  for  the  moment  I  should 
say,  toward  nowhere. 

A  distinguished  alienist  tells  me  that  the  desire 
for  power  over  your  fellow  man  is  an  unmistakable 
sign  of  paranoia,  not  necessarily  paranoia  amount- 
ing to  insanity,  but  the  same  kind  of  paranoia 
which  makes  history  amusing.  If  that  is  true,  then 
we  are  in  an  era  of  perfect  sanity  at  Washington. 
No  one,  no  one,  in  the  White  House,  in  the  Capitol, 
in  Wall  Street,  the  capitol  of  business,  or  back 

76 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

among  the  home  folks,  as  far  as  I  can  learn,  wants 
power — and  responsibility. 

The  picture  I  have  drawn,  quoting  a  bright 
young  observer  at  the  capital  of  what  happens 
when  Business  arrives  in  Washington  is  the  picture 
of  our  whole  present  national  political  organization. 
"A  bunch  of  tall-hatted  fat  boys  comes.  The 
governmental  nose  is  thrust  out  awaiting  the  guid- 
ing hand.  The  guiding  hand  is  put  unostenta- 
tiously behind  the  back."  It  is  the  same  when  the 
organ  of  leading  is  extended  from  the  White  House 
for  the  hand  of  leadership  at  the  Capitol,  or,  as 
happens,  as  often  the  organ  of  leading  at  the  Capi- 
tol awaits  the  hand  of  leadership  at  the  White 
House. 

Power  is  in  transition  and  we  do  much  inconsis- 
tent thinking  about  where  it  is  and  where  it  should 
be.  We  deliberately  elected  a  weak  executive,  to 
retrieve  the  blessed  days  of  McKinley,  the  old 
equilibrium  and  co-ordination  of  the  equal  and  co- 
ordinate branches  of  our  government.  Yet  when 
things  go  badly  in  Congress,  as  they  mostly  do,  the 
critics  exclaim  that  the  President  should  be  firm 
and  "assert  his  authority"  on  the  hill.  Mr.  Hard- 
ing himself  said,  over  and  over  again,  "This  is  no 
one  man  job  at  Washington. ' '  Yet  we  read  that  his 
face  assumes  a  "determined  expression" — I  have 
myself  never  seen  it — and  he  sends  for  the  leaders 
in  Congress. 

We  haven't  executive  domination  and  we  haven't 

77 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

anything  in  its  place.  We  voted  to  go  back  to  the 
nineties,  but  we  haven't  got  there.  There  is  no 
Mark  Hanna  speaking  for  business  and  for  party 
to  make  the  system  work.  We  have  the  willessness 
of  the  blessed  days  in  our  National  Heartbreak 
House,  but  we  haven't  the  will  somewhere  else  to 
act  and  direct.  Not  even  seven  million  majority 
is  enough  to  bring  back  the  past.  In  spite  of 
"landslides"  the  course  is  always  forward,  and  I 
use  "forward"  not  in  the  necessarily  optimistic 
sense  of  those  who  were  once  so  sure  of  Progress. 

The  initiative,  so  far  as  there  is  any,  has  passed 
to  Congress. 

And  so  far  as  I  can  see,  it  is  likely  to  remain  with 
Congress,  until  some  new  turn  of  events  brings  us 
back  the  strong  executive.  For,  after  all,  Congress 
chose  Mr.  Harding.  The  Senators  picked  him  at 
Chicago.  With  party  bosses  gone,  they  are  about 
all  that  remains  of  the  party,  and  there  is  no  reason 
why  they  should  not  go  on  naming  Presidents.  And 
the  power  of  presidents  will  not  rise  much  above  its 
source. 

The  autocratic  President  goes  inevitably  the  way 
its  prototype  the  autocrat  went.  The  loins  that 
produce  them  are  sufficiently  fertile.  Primogeniture 
brought  forth  feeble  kings.  The  nominating  system 
called  on  for  a  great  man  every  four  years  yields 
many  feeble  ones.  There  will  be  many  Hardings 
to  one  Roosevelt  or  Wilson.  Party  government 
which  might  reinforce  a  feeble  president  is  weak. 

78 


THE  SUPER-PRESIDENT  GOES  DOWN 

Government  by  business  has  lost  its  confidence  and 
authority.  The  great  discovery  of  the  first  decade 
of  this  century  for  making  this  government  of  ours 
work  is  already  in  the  discard. 

So  at  a  critical  moment  when  government  by 
Progress  and  government  by  business  have  broken 
down,  government  by  one  man  at  Washington  has 
also  gone.  The  war  made  the  autocratic  executive 
in  the  person  of  Mr.  Wilson  intolerable.  It  also 
destroyed  the  basis  for  national  concentration  upon 
the  executive. 

We  need  a  new  picture  in  our  heads  of  what 
government  should  be,  what  its  limits  should  be 
when  it  faces  such  vital  problems  as  interfering 
with  God's  time,  and  where  its  authority  should 
center.  We  have  none. 


79 


CHAPTER  V 

LOOKING  FOR   ULTIMATE  WISDOM — IN    THE   BOSOM 
OF  TH&R&SE 

WE  now  pursue  further  the  search  for  authority. 
We  shall  surely  find  "divine  right"  somewhere, 
now  that  business  has  lost  it.  Someone  certainly 
has  the  final  word  about  the  pictures  to  put  in  our 
heads.  Ah!  there  is  the  public,  the  imputation 
of  a  miraculous  quality  to  whose  opinion  has  a 
curious  history. 

Everybody  agrees  that  we  owe  most  of  the 
pleasant  illusions  upon  which  this  democracy  of  ours 
is  based  to  Rousseau.  This  Swiss  sentimentalist 
about  humanity,  whose  ideas  have  so  profoundly 
affected  the  history  of  the  last  century  and  a  half, 
was  a  convinced  believer  that  perfect  good  sense 
resided  in  the  bosom  of  the  natural  man,  the  man 
"born  free  and  equal "  of  our  Declaration  of 
Independence. 

Rousseau  could  find  this  simple  wisdom  which 
was  his  delight  in  the  most  unexpected  places. 
He  describes  his  mistress  Th£rese  with  whom  he 
lived  many  happy  years:  "Her  mind  is  what 

80 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

nature  has  made  it;  cultivation  is  without  effect. 
I  do  not  blush  to  avow  that  she  has  never  known 
how  to  read,  although  she  writes  passably.  When 
I  went  to  live  in  the  Rue  Neuve  des  Petits  Champs 
I  had  opposite  my  windows  a  clock  face  on  which 
I  tried  during  several  months  to  teach  her  to  tell 
time.  She  can  scarcely  do  it  even  now.  She  has 
never  known  in  their  order  the  twelve  months  of 
the  year,  and  she  does  not  know  a  single  figure  in 
spite  of  all  the  pains  I  have  taken  to  explain  them 
to  her.  .  .  .  But  this  person,  so  limited  and, 
if  you  wish,  so  stupid,  has  excellent  judgment  on 
occasions  of  difficulty.  Often  in  my  troubles  she 
has  seen  what  I  did  not  see  myself;  she  has  given 
me  the  best  advice  to  follow.  She  has  pulled  me 
out  of  dangers  into  which  I  rushed  blindly.  .  .  . 
The  heart  of  my  Therese  was  the  heart  of  an 
angel.  (Le  cosur  de  ma  TherZse  etait  celui  (Tun 


It  would  be  amusing  to  trace  our  belief  in  the 
good  sense  of  man,  in  the  wisdom  and  justice  of 
public  opinion,  back  to  a  philosopher's  delight  in  a 
female  moron;  but  that  would  be  too  great  a  para- 
dox for  a  serious  discussion  of  today's  crisis  in 
popular  government.  The  truth  probably  is  that 
Rousseau  reached  a  priori  the  conclusions  about 
the  sound  sense  of  the  simple  and  natural  man  that 
captivated  a  society  so  simple  and  natural  as  our 
own  was  in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  then 
stumbled  upon  such  convincing  evidence  in  the  per- 
6  81 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

son  of  Ther£se  that  he  had  to  keep  it  by  him  all  the 
rest  of  his  days. 

And  where  after  all  has  there  been  found  any 
better  evidence  for  our  belief  in  the  soundness  and 
justice  of  public  opinion  than  was  furnished  by  the 
unlettered  and  unteachable  Therese,  who  had 
"le  coeur  d'un  ange"  and  "devant  les  dames  du 
plus  haut  rang,  devant  les  grands  et  les  princes,  ses 
sentiments,  son  bon  sens,  ses  reponses  et  sa  con- 
duite  lui  out  tire  1'estime  universelle  "  ? 

To  accept  the  doctrine  of  the  Tightness  of  public 
opinion  you  must  believe  that  there  resides  in 
every  man,  even  in  the  most  unpromising  man,  of 
the  mental  level  of  Therese,  "si  bornee  et,  si  Ton 
veut,  si  stupide,"  the  capacity  to  be,  like  her, 
"d'un  conseil  excellent  dans  les  occasions  difficiles." 

The  doctrine  of  the  Tightness  of  public  opinion, 
however,  never  required  proof.  It  was  a  political 
necessity.  The  world  at  the  time  when  modern 
democracies  had  their  birth  accepted  government 
only  because  it  rested  upon  divine  right.  The 
government  of  men  by  mere  men  has  always  been 
intolerable. 

The  new  democracies  which  were  to  take  the 
place  of  the  old  kingdoms  had  to  have  some 
sanction  other  than  the  suffrages  of  the  people. 
Room  had  to  be  found  in  them  somewhere  for 
divine  right.  Those  who  established  the  modern 
system  could  never  have  sold  self-government  to 
the  people  as  self  government.  There  had  to  be 

82 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

some  miracle  about  it,  something  supernatural, 
like  that  marvel  which  turned  a  mere  man  into  a 
King  and  gave  him  that  power  of  healing  by  touch 
which  was  exercised  in  Galilee,  so  that  the  laying 
on  of  his  hands  cured  the  king's  evil. 

The  miracle  was  accomplished  somewhere  in  the 
process  through  which  your  opinion  and  my  opin- 
ion and  Th6rese's  opinion  became  public  opinion. 
Just  as  the  anointment  or  the  coronation  turned 
a  mere  human  being  by  a  miracle  into  the  chosen  of 
God  ruling  by  divine  right,  so  by  some  transmuta- 
tion which  does  not  take  place  before  the  eyes, 
mere  human  opinion  becomes  itself  the  choice  of 
God,  ruling  by  divine  right. 

If  you  doubt  that  the  founders  of  modern  de- 
mocracy had  to  carry  over  into  their  systems  the 
old  illusions  about  divine  right,  read  what  Thomas 
Jefferson,  more  or  less  a  free  thinker,  quoted  by 
Mr.  Walter  Lippmann  in  his  Public  Opinion,  has 
to  say  about  the  divine  basis  for  popular  govern- 
ment: "Those  who  labor  in  the  earth  are  the 
chosen  people  of  God,  if  ever  He  had  a  chosen 
people,  whose  breasts  He  has  made  His  peculiar 
deposit  for  substantial  and  genuine  virtue.  It  is 
the  focus  in  which  He  keeps  alive  that  sacred  fire 
which  might  otherwise  escape  from  the  earth." 

That  "  deposit  for  substantial  and  genuine 
virtue"  was  public  opinion.  Nothing  was  lost  of 
the  sanctions  of  monarchic  government  when  we 
changed  to  popular  government. 

83 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Since  the  days  of  Jefferson  we  have  ceased  to  be 
an  agricultural  people  and  we  can  no  longer  de- 
rive the  authority  of  our  government  from  the 
Rousseauist  notion  that  the  farmer,  being  near  to 
nature,  thrusting  his  hands  into  the  soil,  was  the 
choice  of  God  and  ruled  by  a  kind  of  divine  right. 
But  "aucune  religion  n'est  jamais  morte,  ni  ne 
mourra  jamais." 

Let  us  examine  the  doctrine  of  Jefferson.  Public 
opinion  ruled  by  divine  right  because,  in  this 
country  and  in  his  day,  it  was  the  opinion  of 
farmers,  who  were  "the  chosen  people  of  God 
whose  breasts  He  has  made  the  peculiar  deposit 
for  substantial  and  genuine  virtue." 

When  we  ceased  to  be  a  nation  of  farmers  did 
we  abandon  the  basis  of  our  government  in  divine 
right?  Not  in  the  least.  We  broadened  our  ground 
to  cover  the  added  elements  of  the  community  and 
went  along  further  with  Rousseau  than  Jefferson 
had  need  to  do;  we  said  that  the  breasts  of  all  men 
"He  has  made  the  peculiar  deposit  for  substantial 
and  genuine  virtue."  The  art  of  uncovering  their 
substantial  and  genuine  virtue,  this  quality  in 
Th6r£se  which  drew  down  upon  her  universal  es- 
teem for  her  good  sense  and  her  sound  sentiments, 
is  the  art  of  arriving  at  public  opinion. 

The  legend  of  public  opinion  is  thus  ac- 
counted for;  first,  you  will  observe,  it  was  politi- 
cally necessary  to  assert  the  inspiration  of  public 
opinion,  for  divine  right  had  to  reside  somewhere. 

84 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

Second,  in  a  democracy  the  press  and  public  men 
had  to  flatter  the  mass  of  voters  and  readers  by 
declaring  on  every  possible  occasion  that  wisdom 
reposed  in  their  breasts.  And  third,  the  public 
mind  differed  so  from  the  ordinary  thinking  mind 
that,  to  put  its  conclusions  in  a  favorable  light, 
men  had  to  assume  some  supernatural  quality, 
some  divine  "deposit  for  substantial  and  genuine 
virtue. " 

The  public  did  not  think,  in  the  ordinary  sense, 
yet  its  decisions  were  more  right  than  the  care- 
fully elaborated  decisions  of  those  who  did  think; 
the  wonder  of  Therese  over  again,  who  "  si  born6e  et 
si  stupide"  gave  such  excellent  advice  on  difficult 
occasions.  No  processes  by  which  results  were 
reached  could  be  perceived  by  the  trained  mind. 
The  mystery  of  the  public  mind  was  as  great  as  the 
mystery  of  intuitions  is  to  the  logical  or  the  mys- 
tery of  poetry  is  to  the  prosaic.  Clearly,  a  miracle; 
clearly,  a  deposit  for  substantial  and  genuine 
virtue. 

When  modern  democracy  got  its  start,  kings  by 
their  folly  had  shaken  faith  in  their  divine  right. 
In  a  similar  way  at  this  moment,  public  opinion 
by  its  excesses  has  made  men  question  whether 
any  " deposit  for  substantial  and  genuine  virtue" 
has  been  placed  in  human  breasts  upon  which 
states  may  rely  for  justice  and  wisdom. 

Walter  Lippmann's  book,  Public  Opinion,  with 
its  destructive  analysis  of  the  public  mind,  is  a 

85 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

symptom  of  those  doubts  with  which  the  war  has 
left  us.  The  years  from  1914  on  furnished  the 
most  perfect  exhibition  of  public  opinion  and  its 
workings  that  the  world  has  ever  seen.  You  saw 
on  a  grand  scale  its  miraculous  capacity  for  instant 
formation  and,  if  you  are  sufficiently  detached  now, 
you  look  back  and  doubt  whether  what  was  re- 
veaJed  was  a  "  deposit  for  substantial  and  genuine 
virtue. " 

Both  sides  to  the  conflict  resembled  nothing  so 
much  as  prehistoric  tribes  meeting  accidentally 
in  the  night  and,  precipitated  into  panic,  fighting 
in  the  belief  that  each  was  being  attacked  by  the 
other. 

Public  opinion  in  France  and  England  felt  that 
the  war  was  defensive.  Public  opinion  in  Germany 
was  equally  sure  that  Germany  was  only  defending 
herself.  Either  the  German  Th6rdse  or  the  French 
Th6rese  and  the  English  Therese  and  the  American 
Th6rese  must  have  been  wrong.  The  fight  could 
not  have  been  defensive  on  both  sides.  And  if 
Therese  is  ever  so  wrong  as  this,  the  whole  case 
of  the  divine  rightness  of  public  opinion  falls. 

And  not  only  do  we  know  that  some  Th6rese, 
perhaps  all  the  Therdses,  made  a  mistake  in  this 
instance,  but  we  have  come  to  feel  that  whenever 
danger  arises  Th6r£se  is  inevitably  wrong ;  her  mind, 
such  as  it  is,  closes  up  and  she  fails  to  show  those 
sentiments  and  that  bon  sens  which  drew  down  the 
applause  of  the  princes  and  the  persons  du  haut  rang 

86 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

who  have  been  praising  the  deposit  of  virtue  that 
she  carries  in  her  breast. 

We  have  watched  the  course  of  Th6rese  con- 
fronted by  other  and  smaller  fears  since  the  close  of 
the  war,  and  we  have  reached  the  conclusion  that 
Therese  always  reacts  a  certain  way.  In  that  large 
range  of  situations  which  may  be  artfully  pre- 
sented to  her  simple  mind  as  perils  she  is  no  longer 
d'un  conseil  excellent;  her  heart  (Tun  ange  hardens; 
she  abandons  her  babies  quite  unfeelingly  at  the 
hospital  of  the  Nouveaux  Nes. 

Therefore  you  do  not  reach  the  "deposit  for 
virtue"  by  simply  employing  an  intelligence 
unencumbered  by  mental  processes.  You  must  at 
least  assure  that  intelligence  against  fear,  a  serious 
limitation  upon  the  doctrine  of  an  infallible  public 
opinion. 

Students  of  public  opinion  will  for  a  long  time  go 
back  to  the  period  of  the  war  for  their  materials. 
Opinion  was  then  unmistakable.  The  methods 
by  which  it  was  formed  were  clear.  In  times  of 
great  peril  men  throw  off  their  polite  disguises  and 
are  frank;  so  too  are  institutions. 

The  making  of  opinion  became  an  official  func- 
tion in  which  we  all  co-operated.  We  bound  our- 
selves voluntarily  not  to  publish  and  not  to  regard 
any  information  inconsistent  with  the  state  of 
mind  which  it  was  deemed  expedient  to  create 
and  maintain.  We  probably  always  in  the  form- 
ing of  opinion  tacitly  impose  voluntary  censor- 

87 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

ships,  but  they  are  so  habitual,  so  unconscious,  so 
covered  with  traditional  hypocrisy,  that  it  is 
difficult  to  bring  them  into  the  light. 

Conscious  self-deception  to  the  good  end  of 
keeping  ourselves  united  and  determined  was  dur- 
ing the  war  a  great  virtue.  Playing  upon  prejudice, 
rousing  the  depths  of  the  primitive  mind  in  man, 
was  a  laudable  act  of  patriotism. 

What  happened  then  was  only  an  exaggeration 
of  what  happens  all  the  time,  for  war  makes  no 
new  contributions  to  the  art  of  self-government. 
In  war  we  merely  throw  off  the  restraints  of  peace 
and  impose  others  which,  operate  in  the  reverse 
direction.  In  peace  we  are  shamefaced  about 
direct  killing;  in  war  we  brag  of  it.  In  peace  we 
are  shamefaced  about  manufacturing  public 
opinion;  in  war  it  is  our  patriotic  duty. 

No,  war  has  made  us  rather  doubtful  about 
Th6r6se.  After  all  Rousseau  was  a  prejudiced 
witness.  When  you  take  to  your  bosom  a  lady 
who  cannot  learn  to  tell  time  by  the  clock,  you 
have  to  make  out  a  case  for  her — or  for  yourself. 
When  like  Jefferson  and  his  successors  you  take 
to  your  bosom  the  public,  you  have  to  make  out 
a  case  for  it,  for  the  deposit  for  substantial  and 
genuine  virtue  that  you  rely  upon. 

The  war  revealed  at  once  the  immense  power 
and  the  immense  dangers  of  public  opinion  when 
its  full  force  is  aroused  and  one  hundred  million 
people  come  to  think — thinking  is  not  the  word — 

88 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

to  feel,  as  one  man.  Minorities,  the  great  cor- 
rective in  democracy,  disappeared.  They  had 
their  choice  of  going  to  jail  or  bowing  to  the  general 
will. 

Few  realized  this  alternative,  so  irresistible  was 
the  mob  impulse,  awakened  by  the  sense  of  com- 
mon danger,  even  to  individuals  ordinarily  capable 
of  maintaining  their  detachment.  The  primitive 
instinct  of  self-preservation  subdued  all  capacity 
for  independent  thinking,  so  that  one  who  has 
ordinarily  the  habit  of  making  up  his  own  mind,  a 
most  difficult  habit  to  maintain  in  modern  society, 
can  not  look  back  on  himself  during  the  war  with- 
out a  sense  of  shame.  Romain  Rolland,  in  Cleram- 
beault,  pictures  the  devastating  effect  of  public 
opinion  at  its  mightiest  upon  the  individual 
conscience. 

The  mechanism  by  which  this  state  of  mind  was 
created  was  unconcealed.  The  government  re- 
served to  itself  the  right  to  suppress  truth  or  to  put 
out  untruth  for  the  common  good.  Private  organ- 
izations of  endless  number  co-operated  to  this 
laudable  end.  The  press  submitted  itself  to  a 
voluntary  censorship,  passing  the  responsibility  for 
what  it  printed  over  to  society  whose  general  end 
of  maintaining  unity  for  the  real  or  imaginary 
necessities  of  self-defense  it  served.  A  lynch  law 
of  opinion  was  established  by  common  consent. 

What  went  on  during  the  war  goes  on,  though 
less  openly  and  less  formidably,  all  of  the  time. 

89 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Everyone  realizes  the  immense  power  of  public 
opinion.  Many  seek  to  direct  its  formation.  The 
government  conducts  all  of  the  time  a  vast  propa- 
ganda, always  with  a  certain  favor  of  the  press. 

We  submit  always  to  a  certain  voluntary  cen- 
sorship, not  so  conscious  as  that  which  existed 
during  the  war  but  none  the  less  real.  We  receive 
upon  the  whole  the  information  which  is  good  for 
us  to  receive.  We  are  all  a  little  afraid  of  public 
opinion,  its  tyranny,  its  excesses,  its  blind  tenden- 
cies. We  do  not  find  it,  as  Jefferson  thought  we 
should,  a  "  deposit  for  substantial  and  genuine 
virtue,"  and  we  are  all  more  or  less  consciously 
trying  to  make  it  one ;  that  is  the  process  of  render- 
ing modern  democracy  workable ;  but  we  may  not 
be  all  unprejudiced  about  what  the  deposit  should 
be  or  scrupulous  about  the  means  of  improving 
it. 

The  part  which  the  press  plays  in  this  process 
is  peculiar.  When  editors  or  correspondents  meet 
together  the  speaker  addresses  them  invariably  as, 
"You  makers  of  public  opinion/'  but  the  last  re- 
sponsibility which  journalism  cares  to  assume  is 
the  making  of  public  opinion. 

This  disinclination  began  with  the  exclusion  of 
the  editor's  opinion  from  the  news  columns. 
Gradually,  it  extended  to  the  exclusion  of  his  opin- 
ion from  the  editorial  pages  and  finally  to  its  exclu- 
sion from  his  own  mind.  I  am  speaking  only  of 
tendencies,  not  of  their  complete  realization,  for 

90 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

there  are  notable  exceptions  among  the  greater 
dailies  of  this  country. 

This  movement  is  at  its  strongest  in  the  na- 
tion's capital,  for  official  Washington  likes  to  live 
in  an  intellectual  vacuum,  and  journalism  strives 
successfully  to  please.  With  the  world  crashing 
about  his  ears  the  editor  of  the  Star,  the  best 
newspaper  in  the  capital,  finds  this  to  say: 

"The  Crown  Prince  of  Japan  and  the  Prince  of 
Wales  are  young  men  destined  for  great  parts  in 
world  affairs.  They  are  now  qualifying  for  their 
work. 

"  Last  year  the  former  took  his  first  look  around 
in  the  occidental  world.  He  was  everywhere  most 
cordially  received,  and  returned  home  informed 
and  refreshed  by  what  he  had  seen  and  heard. 
His  vision,  necessarily,  was  considerably  enlarged. 

' '  The  latter  is  now  taking  his  first  look  around  in 
the  oriental  world.  In  a  few  days  he  will  land  in 
Japan  and  be  the  guest  of  the  country  for  a  month. 
The  arrangements  for  his  entertainment  are  elabo- 
rate, and  insure  him  with  a  delightful  and  a  profit- 
able visit.  That  he  will  return  home  informed  and 
refreshed  by  his  travels  is  certain. 

"The  war  has  produced  a  new  world,  which  in 
many  things  must  be  ordered  in  new  ways. 
Young  men  for  action ;  and  here  are  two  young  men 
who  when  they  get  into  action  and  into  their 
stride  will  be  prominent  and  important  in  the 
world  picture/' 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

But  if  a  newspaper  rigidly  excludes  its  editor's 
opinions  from  its  columns,  it  is  singularly  hospi- 
table to  all  other  opinions.  The  President  twice 
a  week  may  edit  the  papers  of  the  entire  country, 
or  Mr.  Hughes  may  do  it  every  day, — or  Mr. 
Hoover  or  Mr.  Daugherty  for  that  matter,  even 
having  extended  to  him  the  privilege  of  anony- 
mity which  editors  used  to  keep  to  them- 
selves, as  a  device  for  giving  force  and  effect  to 
their  ideas. 

The  President  "sees  the  press"  Tuesdays  and 
Fridays,  volunteering  information  or  answering 
questions.  Mr.  Hughes  holds  daily  receptions. 
Everyone  else  big  enough  to  break  into  print 
follows  the  same  practice. 

A  curious  modesty  prevails.  Every  public  man 
loves  to  see  his  name  in  the  newspapers,  yet  no  one 
of  them  at  these  conferences  will  assume  responsi- 
bility for  what  he  says.  All  of  them  resort  to  the 
editorial  practice  of  anonymity. 

The  rule  is  that  the  correspondents  must  not 
quote  Mr.  Harding  or  Mr.  Hughes  or  anyone  else. 

They  must  not  write  "Mr.  Harding  said"  or 
"Mr.  Hughes  said."  They  must  print  what 
Mr.  Harding  or  Mr.  Hughes  said  as  a  fact ;  that  is, 
they  must  put  the  authority  of  their  paper  behind 
it  or,  if  they  doubt,  they  must  assign  for  it  "a 
high  authority,"  thus  putting  the  authority  of 
their  paper  behind  it  at  one  remove. 

The  editor,  having  excluded  his  own  opinions 

92 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

from  his  news  columns,  opens  his  news  columns  to 
Mr.  Harding's  or  Mr.  Hughes's  opinions,  giving 
no  guide  to  the  reader  whether  he  is  printing  fact 
or  opinion,  and,  if  obviously  opinion,  as  to  whose 
opinion  it  is. 

The  rule  is,  nothing  but  news  in  the  news  column. 
The  news  is,  "Mr.  Harding  said  so  and  so."  But 
what  is  printed  is,  "so  and  so  is  a  fact"  or,  "so 
and  so  the  paper  believes  on  unimpeachable 
authority  to  be  a  fact." 

This  official  control  of  news  columns  goes  fur- 
ther. Not  only,  according  to  the  rules,  must  the 
source  of  certain  information  be  regarded  as  a 
confidence  but  essential  facts  themselves  may  not 
be  disclosed. 

One  of  the  most  remarkable  uses  of  the  news 
columns  to  create  public  opinion  was  that  of  At- 
torney-General Palmer  whose  several  announce- 
ments of  red  revolution  in  the  United  States 
startled  the  country  two  years  ago.  A  series  of 
sensational  plots  was  described.  Very  soon  every 
intelligent  correspondent  felt  sure  that  Mr.  Palmer 
was  largely  propaganding.  But  to  say  so  would 
have  been  to  violate  that  law  against  the  expression 
of  opinion  in  news  columns,  so  essential  to  the 
truth  and  accuracy  of  our  press.  Moreover,  if  my 
memory  is  correct,  somewhere  in  the  series  the 
Attorney-General  told  the  press,  in  confidence, 
that  he  was  putting  forth  his  stories  of  revolution 
for  a  purpose.  But  one  does  not  print  confidences. 

93 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

In  this  case  the  news  was  that  Attorney-General 
Palmer  was  issuing  stories  of  discovered  revolu- 
tionary plots  to  combat  a  certain  radicalism  in 
the  labor  movement.  As  printed  it  was  that 
Attorney-General  Palmer  said — he  permitted  his 
name  to  be  used — that  he  had  discovered  revolu- 
tionary plots. 

But  the  uncritical  reader  does  not  ask  himself 
whether  the  Attorney-General  may  not  be  lying. 
And  even  if  he  were  inclined  to  do  so  the  headline 
throws  him  off  his  guard,  for  in  the  limited  space 
available  for  captions,  mere  assertions  tend  to 
become  facts.  As  it  reached  the  reader's  mind 
the  fact  that  Mr.  Palmer  was  avowedly  issuing 
propaganda  became  the  fact  that  evidences  of  a 
great  Bolshevist  plot  against  our  institutions  were 
being  discovered  almost  daily. 

There  are  disadvantages  in  the  official  editing 
of  news  columns.  The  official  does  not  always 
escape  by  shifting  responsibility  to  the  editor. 
The  British  during  the  Washington  Conference 
introduced  an  improvement.  They  put  out  propa- 
ganda which  had  no  authority  at  all.  This  the 
newspapers  either  had  to  leave  out  or  to  print 
on  their  own  authority. 

Lord  Riddell  had  "no  official  connection  with 
the  British  delegation. "  He  had  moreover  a  per- 
fect alibi.  There  was  Sir  Arthur  Willert,  the 
official  spokesman,  who  knew  nothing  and  told 
nothing.  Riddell's  was  a  private  enterprise.  He 

94 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

was  just  a  journalist  willing  to  share  with  other 
journalists  what  information  he  collected.  Just 
a  journalist?  Well,  it  was  true  that  "Lloyd 
George  had  asked  him  to  stay  on  "  when  he  was  on 
the  point  of  departing.  But  that  was  a  confidence 
and  under  the  rides  the  press  does  not  print 
confidences. 

Riddeirs  disclosures  were  perfectly  timed.  The 
best  of  them  came  out  in  the  morning  when  after- 
noon correspondents  must  either  rush  them 
through  as  facts  —  they  could  not  even  say  "on 
the  highest  authority" — or  explain  to  their  editors 
why  they  had  been  beaten  by  their  rivals. 

Riddell  is  one  of  the  British  Premier's  intimates. 
A  lawyer  turned  newspaper  proprietor,  he  brings 
out  the  News  of  the  World,  a  London  Sunday 
publication,  sensational  and  trashy,  of  which 
3,500,000  copies  or  some  such  preposterous  num- 
ber are  sold.  He  started  in  during  the  war  as  a 
spokesman  for  the  British  Premier.  He  kept  it  up 
at  the  Paris  Conference.  And  at  Washington  he 
scored  his  greatest  success. 

What  he  had  said  at  his  seance  was,  "Now,  of 
course,  I  don't  know,  but  I  imagine  the  Confer- 
ence will  do  thus  and  so."  He  was  delightfully 
irresponsible,  having  no  official  connection.  He 
could  leak  when  he  had  anything  to  leak.  He 
could  guess,  near  the  truth  or  far  from  the  truth, 
for,  after  all,  he  was  only  "imagining."  He  joked. 
He  indulged  in  buffoonery.  He  put  out  propa- 

95 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

ganda  when  he  wished.  But  he  mixed  enough 
truth  with  it  all  so  that  the  correspondents  thronged 
his  meetings.  So  far  as  there  was  publicity  at  the 
Conference,  he  was  that  publicity. 

There  was  nothing  of  the  great  man  about  him. 
He  did  not  pretend  to  be  a  statesman.  He  did  not 
take  himself  seriously.  He  reached  out  for  his 
public  in  the  same  undress  way  that  he  does  in  his 
Sunday  newspaper.  * l  Ex-tra-ter-ri-to-ri-al-ity , ' '  he 
would  say,  "that's  a  long  word.  I  never  heard  it 
before  I  came  here."  "Kow  Loon,  where  is  the 
place  anyway?"  You  felt  that  for  the  British 
Empire  these  places  and  issues  were  trivialities. 

He  was  familiar,  quite  inoffensively.  "The 
highly  intelligent  seal  of  the  Associated  Press — 
was  it  Mr.  Hood  here? — must  have  been  under 
the  table  in  the  committee  room  when  he  got  this 
story.  He  knows  more  about  it  than  I  do."  He 
was  humorous.  "The  Conference  means  to  do 
good  and,  according  to  the  well  known  rule — what 
is  it? — Oh,  yes!  'Cast  your  bread  upon  the 
waters' — and  by — er — a  certain  repercussion  we 
all  expect  to  benefit." 

It  was  not  said  cynically.  It  was  no  effort  to 
be  funny.  It  was  natural  and  inevitable.  Lord 
Riddell  himself  did  good  to  the  press,  and  by  a 
certain  repercussion  the  British  Empire  benefited. 
It  was  a  publicity  "stunt"  that  has  never  been 
equalled.  Never  before  did  one  man  have  world 
opinion  so  much  in  his  hands.  Only  RiddelTs  per- 

96 


LORD    RIDDELL 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

sonality,  his  friendliness,  his  apparent  disingenu- 
ousness,  his  trifling,  enabled  him  to  exercise  his 
power — these  and  the  immense  demand  for  pub- 
licity, where  aside  from  his  there  was  little. 

The  hospitality  of  news  columns  is  not  extended 
to  officials  alone.  A  vast  industry  second  only  to 
that  of  news  collecting  has  been  built  up  for  the 
purpose  of  conveying  opinions  to  readers  in  the 
guise  of  news.  Its  constant  growth  is  a  proof  of 
its  success. 

The  reason  for  the  opening  of  newspaper  columns 
to  it  is  commercial.  A  variety  of  interests  and 
opinions  tends  to  reflect  itself,  as  at  Paris,  in  a 
multiplicity  of  newspapers.  The  American  news- 
paper proprietor  has  avoided  competition  by 
steadily  restricting  the  expression  of  opinion  first 
in  the  news  columns  and  then  on  the  editorial 
page,  so  as  to  offend  as  few  of  his  readers  as  pos- 
sible, and  then  opening  his  news  columns  to 
opinions  which  he  could  not  approve  on  his  edi- 
torial page,  provided  they  could  be  disguised  as 
news. 

But  the  faults  of  public  opinion  as  a  governing 
force  do  not  spring  from  an  uncritical  journalism, 
conducted  in  haste  and  under  compulsion  to  be  in- 
teresting rather  than  adequate,  too  little  edited  by 
its  editors  and  too  much  edited  by  others.  The 
trouble  with  Therese  is  her  lack  of  mind.  In  spite 
of  her  good  sense  and  habit  of  giving  excellent 
advice  she  is  bornee  et,  si  Von  veut,  stupide.  We 
7  97 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

do  not  find  in  her  what  Rousseau  was  convinced 
he  found  in  her,  "a  deposit  for  substantial  and 
genuine  virtue. " 

We  know  more  about  the  public  mind  today 
than  Jefferson  did  when  he  wrote  about  it.  We 
have  studied  the  psychology  of  the  mob  and  we 
know  that  the  psychology  of  the  public  is  not  dif- 
ferent. Like  the  mind  of  Therese,  the  public  mind 
has  never  grown  up ;  with  this  difference,  that  the 
mind  of  Therese  never  could  grow  up  and  the 
mind  of  the  public,  we  hope,  will. 

The  public  mind  is  young.  Only  for  a  very  few 
years  in  the  history  of  the  race  has  there  been  any 
such  thing  as  a  conscious  public.  Jefferson  was 
right  in  thinking  that  its  mind  was  not  the  sum  of 
the  individual  minds:  nevertheless,  it  is  not  a  "de- 
posit for  virtue."  Men  act  in  a  mass  quite  dif- 
ferently from  the  way  they  act  as  individuals,  only 
unfortunately  there  is  not  any  necessary  divine 
Tightness  about  the  way  they  act:  there  is  often 
divine  wrongness. 

We  have  built  up  the  machinery  for  converting 
one  hundred  million  widely  scattered  people  into  a 
public,  for  giving  it  a  sense  of  community,  but  we 
have  not  at  an  equal  rate  built  up  a  public  mind. 

With  the  telegraph,  the  wireless  telephone,  the 
standardized  press,  the  instant  bulletin  going 
everywhere,  we  can  stir  the  whole  people  as  a  mob, 
make  it  revert  into  a  frightened  herd,  but  we  can 
not  make  it  think. 

98 


LOOKING  FOR  ULTIMATE  WISDOM 

The  public  is  too  young  to  have  a  developed 
mind.  In  a  hundred  generations  it  may  have  one. 

This  experiment  in  democracy  is  conducted  in 
the  faith  that  it  will  have  one,  that  the  mass  of 
mankind  may  be  lifted  up  so  that  there  will  be  as 
much  freedom  of  thinking  in  a  democratic  society 
as  there  once  was  in  an  aristocratic  society.  It  is 
the  bravest  experiment  in  history  but  its  success 
is  afar  off,  Rousseau's  belief  in  Therese  to  the 
contrary  notwithstanding. 

In  the  present  state  of  undeveloped  mind  and 
overdeveloped  machinery  of  communication  public 
opinion  is  a  great  negative  force.  It  does  nothing 
constructive.  It  can  only  be  thoroughly  aroused 
by  a  suggestion  of  danger.  Statesmen  are  both 
afraid  of  it  and  despise  it,  and  between  contempt 
and  fear  are  reduced  to  temporary  expedients. 

So  that  when  we  speak  of  government  by  public 
opinion  we  speak  of  something  that  has  been  as 
badly  shaken  as  government  by  business,  or  execu- 
tive government  or  party  government  or  any  one 
of  the  various  governments  upon  which  we  once 
relied.  The  war  has  made  it  almost  as  intolerable 
as  it  made  autocracy,  as  practiced  by  Mr.  Wilson. 

Shall  official  Washington  turn  to  public  opinion 
as  its  guide?  Official  Washington  is  busy  all  the 
time  with  all  the  arts  it  used  during  the  war  shap- 
ing public  opinion  to  its  own  ends.  It  must  have 
been  hard  for  a  king's  minister  to  believe  in  the 
divinity  of  the  monarch  he  was  gulling.  And  at 

99 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

any  moment  public  opinion  may  belong  to  Mr. 
Hearst. 

This  new  ruler  by  divine  right  is  not  going  to  be 
so  easy  to  dethrone  as  his  predecessors.  No  new 
Rousseau  will  discern  a  new  Therese.  Mr.  Walter 
Lippmann  would  set  up  in  its  place  the  expert  by 
divine  right,  but  the  expert  is  a  palpable  pretender. 

The  best  hope  for  the  present  moment  is  per- 
haps to  divide  the  public.  Minorities  based  on 
interest  will  at  least  be  constructive.  Organized, 
they  may  offer  an  effective  resistance.  Out  of 
them  may  come  a  development  of  the  public  mind. 

If  Jefferson  were  writing  today  he  might  say 
that  the  farm  bloc  contained  the  "deposit  for  sub- 
stantial and  genuine  virtue/1  At  any  rate  it  tills 
the  soil. 

If  we  break  up  the  threatening  mass  which  the 
war  has  taught  us  to  fear,  there  might  be  organized 
a  thinkers'  bloc.  Thinking  in  this  country  cer- 
tainly needs  a  bloc. 


100 


CHAPTER  VI 

SHALL    WE    FIND    OUR    SALVATION    SITTING,    LIKE 
MR.   MELLON,   ON  A  PILE  OF  DOLLARS 

THE  conditions  which  face  Mr.  Harding  are  like 
those  which  face  the  administrator  of  a  corpora- 
tion left  by  its  old  head  and  creator  to  the  direc- 
tion of  an  incompetent  son.  The  young  man 
is  the  nominal  master  of  the  business.  He  lacks 
confidence  in  himself  and  what  is  worse  still  his 
wife  and  mother  lack  confidence  in  him.  They 
have  fortified  him  with  a  brother-in-law  as  a 
right  hand  man.  His  brother-in-law  knows  little 
of  the  business  and  can  never  forget  that  he  is  the 
creature  of  his  sister  and  her  mother-in-law. 

The  administrator  of  this  corporation  wishes  to 
obtain  a  decision  upon  policy.  The  proprieties 
require  him  to  consult  its  nominal  head.  The 
young  man,  unsure  of  himself,  must  talk  it  over 
with  the  mentor  whom  his  wife  and  mother  have 
provided.  He  in  turn  proves  no  final  authority 
but  must  discuss  the  question  with  his  sister. 
Ultimately  the  widow  who  owns  most  of  the  stock 
must  be  approached.  She  hires  others  to  run  the 

101 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

property,  wonders  why  they  do  not  run  it.  The 
very  fact  that  the  others  could  reach  no  decision 
makes  her  cautious  about  reaching  one  herself. 
The  administrator  goes  vainly  about  this  circle 
seeking  for  a  "yes"  or  "no." 

The  government  was  simple  when  the  public 
had  faith  in  the  social  purposes  of  business  and 
public  opinion  did  not  differ  greatly  from  business 
opinion.  Parties  reflected  the  will  of  business. 
Authority  was  centered.  Whether  you  said  it 
resided  in  parties  or  in  business  or  in  public  opinion 
made  little  difference.  There  was  substantial 
agreement.  A  "yes"  or  "no"  was  easy. 

Suppose  Mr.  Harding  should  be  in  doubt,  as  he 
is  so  often — today.  He  asks  himself  what  is  party 
opinion,  what  is  business  opinion,  what  is  public 
opinion,  or  what  is  the  opinion  of  some  powerful 
minority  which  may  turn  an  election  against  him. 

His  party  has  no  opinion;  it  exists  by  virtue  of 
its  capacity  to  think  nothing  about  everything  and 
thus  avoid  dissensions.  Business  is  of  two  minds 
and  is  moreover  afraid  of  the  public.  It  will  as- 
sume no  responsibility.  Public  opinion,  what  is  it? 
Mr.  Hearst's  newspapers?  Or  the  rest  of  the 
press?  Or  the  product  of  the  propaganda  con- 
ducted from  Washington?  Or  something  that 
Mr.  Harding  may  create  himself  if  he  will?  Minor- 
ity opinion  is  definite,  but  is  it  safe?  Where  is 
authority? 

A  return  to  those  happy  days  when  authority  did 

102 


OUR  SALVATION 

center  somewhere,  when  in  conducting  the  busi- 
ness you  did  not  have  to  run  around  the  whole 
circle  seeing  the  young  man,  his  wife,  his  brother- 
in-law,  and  the  widow  who  inherited  the  property, 
is  our  constant  dream.  Let  us  get  back  to  party 
government,  exclaimed  Mr.  Harding;  so  the  na- 
tion voted  to  do  so,  only  to  find  there  were  neither 
parties  nor  party  government. 

Let  us,  then,  it  is  suggested,  found  some  new 
party  that  will  "  stand  for  something, "  that  will 
synthesize  in  one  social  aim,  the  common  element 
in  the  aims  of  various  interests  into  which  the 
country  is  divided.  But  no  one  can  point  out  the 
common  basis,  the  principle  which  the  new  party 
shall  advocate. 

Let  us  then  have  a  better  informed  public  opin- 
ion. Mr.  Walter  Lippmann  in  his  new  book  upon 
the  subject,  despairing  of  the  press,  would  put  the 
making  of  public  opinion  in  the  hands  of  experts, 
collecting  the  truth  with  the  impartiality  of 
science. 

We  seek  unity  as  perhaps  the  builders  of  Babel 
sought  it  after  the  confusion  of  tongues  fell  upon 
them. 

One  favorite  hope  of  attaining  it  is  through  a 
new  synthesis  of  business  and  politics.  Govern- 
ment by  business  had  worked.  Let  us  return  to 
Eden.  Let  us  elect  a  business  man  President. 
One  may  substitute  for  President  in  this  last  sen- 
tence Governor  or  Mayor  or  Senator  or  Con- 
ic* 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

gressman,  for  whatever  the  office  is,  this  re- 
cipe is  always  suggested. 

Thus,  so  it  is  piously  hoped,  we  may  get  back  to 
those  good  old  times  before  we  builded  for  our- 
selves this  Babel,  a  government  that  was  inde- 
pendent of  business,  parties  that  were  independent 
of  everything  under  the  sun,  voters  that  were  in- 
dependent of  parties,  a  press  that  was  independent, 
a  propaganda  that  was  independent,  and  blocs  that 
knew  no  rule  but  their  own. 

Elect  the  business  man  to  office,  so  it  is  felt,  and 
you  will  have  an  important  synthesis,  an  old  and 
tried  one,  one  that  worked,  business  and  politics. 
You  will  do  more.  You  will  import  into  public 
life  all  that  wonderful  efficiency  which  we  read 
about  in  the  American  Magazine,  that  will  to 
power,  that  habit  of  getting  things  done,  that  in- 
stant capacity  for  decision  which  we  romantically 
associate  with  commercial  life.  All  this  is  in  the 
minds  of  those  who  urge  this  method  of  achieving 
unity. 

We  have  no  greater  national  illusion  than  the 
business  man  illusion.  In  any  other  country  a 
business  man  is  just  a  business  man;  in  America 
he  is  a  demigod.  Golden  words,  as  Mark  Twain 
said,  flow  out  of  his  mouth.  He  performs  miracles. 
He  has  erected  a  great  industry  and  amassed  a  large 
fortune.  Therefore  he  would  make  a  great  public 
official.  We  never  think  of  him  as  merely  a  special- 
ist having  a  narrow  aptitude  for  heaping  up  money. 

104 


OUR  SALVATION 

The  reasoning  about  the  business  man  is  this. 
Success,  real  success,  comes  to  the  jack  of  all  trades, 
a  major  premise  handed  down  from  pioneer  days. 
"A"  is  a  real  success,  for  he  has  made  several 
millions.  Therefore  "A"  is  a  jack  of  all  trades. 
Therefore  he  would  be  as  great  a  President  as  he  is  a 
shoe  button  manufacturer. 

We  owe  the  business-man  illusion  to  the  pioneers. 
In  a  few  years  they  subjected  a  continent  to  our 
uses.  They  accumulated  for  themselves  wealth 
such  as  the  world  had  never  seen.  The  nation 
does  not  think  of  them  as  the  luckiest  of  a  genera- 
tion facing  such  virgin  resources  as  existed  on  no 
other  continent,  at  a  moment  when  means  of  trans- 
portation such  as  the  world  had  never  seen  before, 
and  machinery  for  manufacture  without  parallel 
were  in  their  hands.  The  marvelous  element  was 
not  the  opportunity  but  the  men. 

One  day  they  were  telegraphers,  day  laborers, 
railroad  section  hands  and  the  next  they  were 
colossal  figures  of  American  enterprise.  As  their 
like  existed  nowhere  else  they  became  the  Ameri- 
can type.  They  established  the  tradition  of 
American  business. 

It  has  been  a  tradition  profitable  to  keep  alive. 
The  men  who  by  luck,  by  picking  other  men's  wits, 
or  by  the  possession  of  a  special  talent,  useful  only 
in  a  society  like  our  own,  grow  vastly  rich,  love  to 
read  how  wonderful  they  are.  For  their  delecta- 
tion a  journalism  has  grown  up  to  celebrate  the 

105 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

epic  of  their  marvelous  industry,  resourcefulness, 
efficiency,  their  god-like  insight  into  the  hearts  of 
men;  whose  praises  they  pay  for  liberally  in  the 
disposition  of  advertising.  Young  men  who  would 
be  great  read  this  journalism  diligently  looking 
for  the  secret  of  success.  Reading  it  they  resolve 
not  to  keep  their  minds  upon  five  o'clock  when  the 
closing  whistle  blows  but  to  become  rich  by  in- 
dustry and  thrift  like  its  great  exemplars;  who 
profit  by  it  not  only  in  having  their  own 
praises  sung  but  in  getting  more  work  out  of  their 
servants. 

So  much  virtue  rests  upon  the  business-man 
illusion  that  no  one  would  lay  an  impious  finger 
on  it.  I  merely  analyze  it  to  exhibit  the  contents 
of  our  minds  when  we  say  "elect  a  business  man 
President,"  and  to  present  the  picture  of  a  demigod 
out  of  the  American  Magazine  in  the  White  House, 
and  a  new  synthesis  of  business  and  politics. 

Moreover,  we  let  ourselves  be  misled  by  the 
habit  of  speaking  of  the  "public  business"  and 
accepting  without  examination  the  analogy  which 
the  word  suggests.  We  say  to  ourselves,  "Well, 
since  government  is  a  business,  the  proper  person 
to  be  in  charge  of  it  is  a  business  man."  But  it  is 
not  business  in  any  exact  sense  of  the  word.  If 
the  product  of  the  operation  were  a  mere  book- 
keeping profit  or  even  mere  bookkeeping  economies 
then  it  might  properly  be  called  a  business.  But 
that  which  business  efficiency  in  office,  if  it  could 

1 06 


OUR  SALVATION 

really  be  obtained,  might  do  well,  is  the  least  part 
of  self-government,  whose  main  end  must  for  a  long 
time  be  the  steady  building  up  of  the  democratic 
ideal. 

But  the  electing  of  business  men  to  office  does 
not  build  up  this  ideal.  On  the  contrary  it  is  a 
confession  of  failure  in  democracy,  an  admission 
that  public  life  in  it  does  not  develop  men  fit  for 
its  tasks,  that  for  capacity  it  is  necessary  to  seek 
in  another  world  and  summon  an  outsider;  estab- 
lish a  sort  of  receivership  in  self-government. 

And  it  is  a  blind  sort  of  receivership.  We  know 
little  about  business  men  except  the  noisy  dis- 
closures of  their  press  agents.  "X"  has  made  a 
million  dollars.  If  we  no  longer  say,  as  in  the  days 
of  Mark  Twain,  that  golden  words  flow  from  his 
mouth,  we  accept  his  wealth  as  proof  positive  of  his 
extraordinary  capacity  for  affairs.  There  is  no 
going  behind  the  fact  of  his  vast  accumulation,  for 
business  is  conducted  in  secret.  The  law  recog- 
nizes that  it  has  to  be,  keeping  in  confidence  facts 
disclosed  through  income  tax  returns. 

When  we  consider  a  successful  business  man 
for  office  no  allowance  can  be  made  for  the  fact 
that  the  intelligence  responsible  for  his  success 
may  not  have  been  his  as  head  of  a  successful 
organization.  In  no  way  may  it  be  asked  and 
answered  whether  all  the  original  force  which  was  in 
him  may  not  have  been  spent  before  he  is  sug- 
gested for  office.  Senator  Knox  was  an  instance 

107 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

of  spent  force,  his  energy  and  ambition  being  gone 
when  he  entered  public  life. 

Luck  may  explain  a  commercial  career  and  you 
cannot  elect  luck  to  office.  Special  talents  which 
are  valuable  in  making  money  may  be  out  of  place 
in  political  life. 

Moreover  commercial  success  in  America  has 
been  easier  than  anywhere  else  in  the  world. 
Opportunities  are  numerous  with  the  result  that 
competition  has  not  been  keen.  Nothing  has  been 
so  over  praised  or  so  blindly  praised  as  business 
success  in  this  country.  We  may  occasionally 
elect  men  in  public  life  to  office  upon  false  repu- 
tations, as  we  did  Vice-President  Coolidge,  credit- 
ing him  with  a  firmness  toward  the  Boston  police 
strikers  which  had  been  shown  by  a  subordinate  in 
his  absence.  But  at  least  the  acts  of  officials  are 
subject  to  popular  scrutiny.  Behind  success  in 
business  we  may  not  look. 

Take  the  case  of  a  Middle  Western  corporation. 
Three  quarters  of  its  profits  came  from  a  sub- 
sidiary. The  history  of  the  subsidiary  is  this: 
The  corporation  came  into  possession  of  certain 
mineral  lands  through  the  foreclosure  of  amortgage. 
A  company  developing  a  product  from  the  mineral 
failed.  The  head  of  the  corporation  acquiring  the 
property  by  foreclosure  thought  this  product  of 
little  value.  A  subordinate  felt  that  it  could  by  a 
change  of  name  and  judicious  advertising  be 
widely  sold.  He  had  great  difficulty  in  persuading 

108 


OUR  SALVATION 

his  employer  but  in  the  end  obtained  the  money  to 
make  his  experiment,  whose  results  fully  justified 
his  judgment.  The  public  seeking  a  business 
man  for  office  would  look  no  further  than  at  the 
success  of  the  corporation,  which  would  be  proof 
sufficient  of  the  great  talents  of  its  head.  Electing 
him  they  would  not  obtain  for  public  service  the 
mind  which  made  the  money,  even  if  it  be  agreed 
that  the  talent  for  making  money  is  a  talent  for 
public  service. 

And  this  case:  A  great  Eastern  trust  acquired 
possession  of  a  piece  of  property  in  this  way:  It 
uses  a  mineral  product  not  much  found  in  this 
country.  Some  Westerners  had  a  deposit.  They 
went  to  the  Eastern  trust,  which  encouraged  them 
and  loaned  them  $10,000  for  its  development. 
They  then  found  that  the  trust  was  the  only  market 
for  the  mineral  and  that  it  had  no  intention  to  buy. 
Ultimately  this  deposit  passed  to  the  trust  by  fore- 
closure of  the  $10,000  mortgage.  The  trust  thus 
obtaining  ownership,  began  mining  and  in  the  first 
year  cleared  $500,000  on  its  $10,000  investment. 
The  transaction  in  this  instance  was  not  the  work 
of  a  subordinate;  it  revealed,  however,  a  peculiar 
talent  in  the  head  of  the  corporation  that  would 
not  be  serviceable  in  public  life. 

To  get  down  to  names.  Many  business  men 
entered  the  service  of  the  government  during  the 
war.  Almost  none  of  them  left  it  with  enhanced 
reputations.  Mr.  Frank  A.  Vanderlip,  who  served 

109 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

in  the  Treasury  Department,  had  little  success,  so 
the  men  who  surrounded  him  felt.  I  am  not  able 
to  assess  the  causes  of  his  failure.  Perhaps  he  had 
assigned  to  him  an  impossible  task. 

Similarly  men  who  had  contact  with  him  while 
financing  the  Republican  campaign  of  1916  were 
disappointed.  After  his  service  at  Washington  he 
ceased  to  be  head  of  a  great  Wall  Street  bank. 
What  do  these  adverse  circumstances  mean  regard- 
ing Mr.  Vanderlip's  fitness  to  be,  let  us  say,  Secre- 
tary of  the  Treasury?  Precisely  nothing,  let  us 
admit.  And  his  success  for  a  number  of  years  in 
banking,  the  large  fortune  he  accumulated,  by  the 
same  reasoning,  mean  no  more. 

Mr.  Vanderlip  is  one  of  our  best  known  business 
men,  yet  what  the  public  knows  about  him  is  no- 
thing. He  was  the  president  of  a  great  bank  and 
amassed  wealth.  An  old  financial  journalist,  he 
has  gift  of  speech  and  writing,  unusual  in  the 
business  world.  His  agreeable  personality  made 
him  liked  by  editors.  He  achieved  unusual  pub- 
licity. Was  his  reputation  solidly  based  or  was  it 
newspaper  made?  The  public  does  not  know,  can- 
not know.  I  use  his  case  by  way  of  illustration. 
Perhaps  he  ought  to  be  President  of  the  United 
States.  But  choosing  a  man  for  office  on  the 
basis  of  his  business  success,  even  so  well  known 
a  man  as  Mr.  Vanderlip,  is  plainly  enough  blind 
gambling. 

We  have  in  office  now  one  of  the  great  business 

no 


OUR  SALVATION 

men  of  the  country.  Mr.  Andrew  W.  Mellon, 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury,  who  is  posed  somewhat 
uneasily  upon  what  is,  many  say,  the  highest  pile 
of  wealth  any  one  has  ever  heaped  up,  except  Mr. 
John  D.  Rockefeller.  I  say  "somewhat  uneasily  " 
because  I  have  in  mind  Mr.  Mellon  emerging  from 
a  Congressional  hearing  at  the  Capitol,  flustered 
and  uncomfortable,  turning  to  a  subordinate  and 
asking  anxiously,  "Well,  did  I  make  a  good 
impression?"  What  could  a  subordinate  reply 
except,  "Yes,  Mr.  Mellon,  you  did  very 
well."? 

But  Mr.  Mellon  does  not  make  a  good  impression 
on  the  witness  stand.  If  he  were  unjustly  accused 
of  a  crime  he  would  hang  himself  by  appearing  in 
his  own  defense,  unless  the  jury  sensed  in  his 
stammering  hesitancy  not  guilt  but  an  honest 
inability  to  express  himself. 

Mr.  Mellon  is  the  shyest  and  most  awkward 
man  who  ever  rose  to  power.  He  is  unhappy 
before  Congressional  committees,  before  reporters 
in  the  dreadful  conferences  which  are  the  outward 
and  visible  evidence  of  our  democracy,  at  Cabinet 
meetings,  where  the  fluent  Mr.  Hughes  casts  him 
terribly  in  the  shade. 

At  one  such  meeting  the  President  dragged  him 
forth  from  silence  by  turning  to  him  and  asking 
him,  "What  has  the  Sphinx  here  got  to  say  on  the 
subject."  Thus  impelled,  the  Secretary  of  the 
Treasury  replied,  unconsciously  in  the  words  of  Sir 

in 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Roger  de  Coverley,  "Well,  Mr.  President,  I  think 
there  is  a  good  deal  to  be  said  on  both  sides." 

If  we  may  believe  the  psychologists,  the  great 
object  of  acquiring  wealth  and  power  is  the  achieve- 
ment of  self-complacency.  If  it  is,  Mr.  Mellon 
has  somehow  missed  it.  You  can  not  imagine 
him  writing  himself  down  beside  the  others  in  the 
great  American  copy  book  and  saying  seriously  to 
the  youth  of  the  land,  "Look  at  me,  I  worked 
always  fifteen  minutes  after  the  whistle  blew  and 
behold  the  result.  Follow  my  footsteps."  No 
golden  words  issue  from  his  mouth.  Some  un- 
forgetable  personal  measure  of  his  own  deserts, 
some  standard  peculiar  to  himself,  perhaps,  refuses 
to  be  buried  under  the  vast  accumulations. 

Were  ever  great  abilities  so  tongue-tied  as  this? 
I  ask  this  question  not  to  answer  it.  I  merely  hold 
Mr.  Mellon  up  as  the  usually  insoluble  riddle,  the 
why  of  great  business  success.  But  granting  that 
the  real  Mr.  Mellon  is  shown  in  the  enormous 
fortune  and  not  in  the  timid  asking  of  a  subordinate, 
"Did  I  make  a  good  impression?  "  does  such  shrink- 
ing, such  ill  adaptation,  on  the  stage  of  public  life 
make  a  contribution  to  the  unending  drama  of  self- 
government? 

I  take  it  that  behind  these  footlights  which  we 
call  Washington,  just  as  behind  the  literal  foot- 
lights, the  actors,  if  there  is  to  be  any  lifting  of  us 
up,  must  play  a  part  with  which  we  can  identify 
ourselves  in  our  imagination.  He  must  be  articu- 

112 


ANDREW  W.    MELLON,    SECRETARY    OF  THE   TREASURY 


OUR  SALVATION 

late.  He  must  get  across.  Mr.  Harding  does  it 
admirably.  You  watch  him  and  you  realize  that 
he  is  the  oldest  of  stage  heroes,  Everyman.  You 
say  to  yourself  unconsciously,  "Only  the  accident 
of  seven  million  majority  separates  him  from  me." 
You  are  lifted  up.  Ordinary  flesh  and  blood  can 
do  this  great  thing. 

Based  on  this  desire  to  identify  ourselves  with 
greatness  is  our  familiar  aphorism,  "The  office 
makes  the  man."  All  that  is  necesary  is  the 
office  to  "make"  the  least ;of  us. 

Roosevelt  played  the  part  even  better  than  Mr. 
Harding,  "an  ordinary  man  raised  to  the  nth 
power. ' '  He  strutted  to  fill  the  eye.  He  was  the 
consummation  of  articulateness.  The  point  is 
that  self-government  must  be  dramatic  or  it  does 
not  carry  along  the  self -governors. 

Of  course  one  must  not  overlook  the  fact  that 
"the  great  silent  man "  is  a  consolation  to  common 
inarticulateness  and  ineffectiveness,  the  general 
belief  that  where  there  is  a  slow  tongue  profundity 
is  found  being  one  of  those  pleasant  things  which 
we  like  to  think  about  ourselves — "we  could  and 
we  would."  But  after  all  there  is  a  sense  of  pity 
about  our  kind  attribution  of  hidden  power  to 
dullness.  We  are  half  aware  that  we  are 
compensating. 

Anyway,  even  if  the  great  business  man  is  at 
home  upon  the  stage,  which  Mr.  Mellon  is  not,  the 
calling  of  him  to  office  interrupts  the  drama  of  self- 

113 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

government.  We  admit  our  failure  and  call  in  the 
gods  from  another  world.  It  is  as  I  have  said  a 
staged  receivership.  We  can  not  identify  our- 
selves with  the  hero.  We  are  poor  worms,  not 
millionaires.  We  might  have  the  seven  million 
majority  but  we  could  not  also  stand  upon  a  pile  of 
seven  million  gold  dollars.  Government  ceases  to 
be  human.  It  becomes  superhuman.  And  self- 
government  must  be  human. 

Of  course,  I  exaggerate.  Mr.  Mellon  coming 
from  that  other  world  is  not  wholly  without  his 
human  relations.  I  have  alluded  to  his  symboliz- 
ing the  wish-fulfilment  of  the  inarticulate,  and 
the  inarticulate  are  many.  He  does  more.  He 
fits  admirably  into  what  Mr.  Walter  Lippmann  has 
called  in  his  new  book  one  of  our  popular  stereo- 
types. We  demand  a  conflict  between  reality  and 
the  stage.  We  like  to  see  the  masks  pulled  off  our 
actors.  One  of  our  best  received  traditions  is  that 
a  man  who  has  a  fight  with  the  politicians  has 
performed  a  great  service.  We  like  to  see  our 
strutters  strut  in  a  little  fear  of  us. 

But  Secretary  Mellon's  defeat  of  Representative 
Fordney,  Senator  Elkins,  and  Elmer  Dover  in  their 
efforts  to  fill  his  department  with  politicians  was 
not  so  much  a  sign  of  power  as  a  measure  of  the 
difference  between  Mr.  Mellon's  world  and  theirs. 

Mr.  Mellon  comes  into  the  Treasury  from  his 
bank.  All  he  knows  is  banking,  not  politics.  If 
he  went  from  the  Mellon  Bank  to  the  National 

114 


OUR  SALVATION 

City  Bank  of  New  York  he  would  not  discharge 
all  the  National  City  Bank  employees  and  bring  in 
a  lot  of  men  who  had  never  seen  the  inside  of  a  bank 
before,  whom  he  did  not  know,  who  didn't  speak 
the  same  language  thatjhe  did.  It  is  only  in  politics 
that  one  finds  such  perfect  faith  in  man  as  man. 

He  goes  to  one  young  Democrat  in  the  Depart- 
ment— this  actually  happened — and  he  says, 
"Young  man,  I  like  your  work.  I  want  you  to 
stay  with  me."  "Ah,  but,  Mr.  Mellon,  I  can't, " 
plead  this  Democrat,  "You  really  can't  do  things 
that  way.  It  is  not  done.  You  will  have  all  the 
Republican  politicians  about  your  ears." 

But  it  was  not  a  sense  of  power  in  Mr.  Mellon 
that  made  him  thus  defy  the  conventions.  It  was 
merely  the  instinct  of  self -protection.  He  could 
not  live  in  the  atmosphere  of  politics.  He  had  to 
do  things  as  he  always  had  done  them.  The  Gods 
coming  down  from  high  Olympus  among  the  sons 
and  daughters  of  men  were  probably  never  as  much 
at  ease  as  the  Greeks  made  them  out  to  be. 

With  his  millions  behind  him  Mr.  Mellon  was  a 
solid  object  in  his  conflict  with  the  politicians. 
Without  them  one  does  not  know  what  would  have 
happened  between  him  and  Mr.  Fordney,  Mr. 
Elkins,  and  Mr.  Dover. 

What  is  a  good  Secretary  of  the  Treasury?  We 
have  a  stereotype  about  that,  too,  one  slowly  and 
painfully  formed.  A  good  Secretary  of  the  Treas- 
ury is  one  who  has  seen  the  inside  of  a  bank,  who 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

has  read  the  books  on  finance  and  knows  the  rules. 
Originally  our  Secretaries  of  the  Treasury  were 
amateurs,  like  our  generals  who  beat  ploughshares 
into  swords.  When  one  got  into  trouble,  he 
boarded  the  Congressional  Limited  for  New  York 
and  saw  Mr.  Morgan.  Mr.  Morgan  came  out  of 
his  bank  holding  the  safety  of  the  nation  in  his 
hands,  exhibiting  it  to  reporters  who  wrote  all 
about  it,  assuring  the  public. 

At  length  it  was  decided  to  keep  the  safety  of  the 
nation  at  Washington.  And  our  Secretaries  of  the 
Treasury  tended  to  become  professional.  The 
young  men  who  tell  us  whether  we  have  a  good 
Secretary  of  the  Treasury  or  not  are  the  financial 
writers  of  the  newspapers.  The  Secretary  acts. 
The  young  men  look  in  the  books  and  see  that  he 
has  conformed  to  the  rules.  When  he  has  he 
leaves  nothing  to  be  desired  as  Secretary. 

Mr.  Mellon's  relation  to  Alexander  Hamilton  is 
the  same  as  Marshal  Foch's  relation  to  Napoleon; 
one  knew  war  from  his  own  head,  the  other  knows 
it  from  the  teachers.  Mr.  Mellon's  administration 
is  not  inspired.  In  the  greatest  financial  crisis  in 
our  history  he  has  no  constructive  suggestion  to 
make.  You  would  hardly  know  that  Secretary 
Houston  was  gone  and  Mr.  Mellon  had  come. 
And  there  is  an  explanation  for  this  continuity, 
beside  that  of  the  rule  books.  The  hard  work  of 
the  Department  has  been  done  under  both  adminis- 
trations by  Assistant  Secretary  S.  P.  Gilbert,  for 

116 


OUR  SALVATION 

Mr.  Mellon  has  the  successful  man's  habit  of 
leaning  heavily  upon  an  able  and  industrious  sub- 
ordinate. Mr.  Gilbert  is  an  ambitious  young 
lawyer  who  has  mastered  the  books  and  who  works 
1 8  hours  a  day.  The  voice  is  the  voice  of  Mellon 
but  the  hand  is  the  hand  of  Gilbert. 

I  have  analyzed  Mr.  Mellon  at  Washington 
although  only  a  small  fraction  of  his  career  is  in- 
volved and  although  he  operates  in  the  difficult 
circumstances  of  an  unknown  and  unfavorable 
environment.  But  he  is  perceptible  in  Washing- 
ton, he  does  appear  before  Congressional  Com- 
mittees and  at  newspaper  conferences.  You  can 
study  the  Gilberts  who  surround  him.  You  can 
estimate  the  prepossessions  that  enter  into  our 
judgment  of  him.  You  can  measure  him  against 
the  standard  of  public  life. 

In  Pittsburg  he  is  more  remote.  He  is  hedged 
about  with  the  secrecy  of  business.  He  is  to  be 
seen  only  through  the  golden  aura  of  a  great  for- 
tune, sitting  shy  and  awkward  upon  an  eminence, 
the  product  of  forces  and  personalities  which  can 
only  be  guessed  at. 

He  was  the  son  of  a  banker  and  inherited  a  con- 
siderable fortune.  He  operated  in  a  city  which 
expanded  fabulously  in  the  course  of  his  lifetime. 
If  he  is  shy  and  unbusiness- worldly,  he  has  a 
brother  who  has  that  force  of  personality  which  we 
usually  associate  with  fitness  for  life.  His  bank  was 
the  chosen  instrument  of  Henry  C.  Frick,  one  of  the 

117 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

pioneer  demigods,  who  could  make  the  business  rep- 
utations of  men  who  proved  adaptable  to  his  uses. 

Thus  into  the  result  there  enters  the  power  of 
Prick,  the  thrust  upward  of  Pittsburg,  an  industrial 
volcano,  the  associated  personality  of  the  other 
Mellon.  You  have  to  give  a  name  to  all  this 
combination  of  favoring  circumstances  and  favor- 
ing personalities  and  names  are  usually  given 
arbitrarily.  The  name  given  in  this  case  is  Andrew 
W.  Mellon.  But  how  much  of  it  is  Andrew  W. 
Mellon  and  how  much  of  it  is  Pittsburg,  how  much 
of  it  Frick,  how  much  of  it  brother  Mellon,  an 
electorate  seeking  a  business  man  for  office  can  not 
£top  to  inquire  and  can  not  learn  if  it  does  inquire. 

If  the  people  elect  a  man  like  Mr.  Mellon  to 
office  they  do  not  enlist  in  the  public  service  the 
combination  of  persons  and  forces  which  is  known 
by  his  name.  Or  if  he  is  all  that  he  seems  to  be, 
measured  by  his  great  fortune,  perhaps  they  get 
him  after  he  has  spent  his  force  or  after  his  head  is 
turned  by  success,  or  at  any  rate  they  put  him  into 
an  unfamiliar  milieu  and  subject  him  to  that 
corrupting  temptation,  the  desire  for  a  second  term 
or  for  a  higher  office. 

And  to  go  back  to  what  I  have  said  before,  they 
make  self-government  go  into  bankruptcy  and  ask 
for  a  receiver. 

The  great  business-man  President  is  just  a 
romantic  development  of  the  great  business-man 
illusion. 

118 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET,  AND  WHAT 
IS  IN  THE  BOTTLE 

MR.  MELLON'S  associates  in  the  Cabinet  were 
most  of  them  chosen  on  substantially  the  same 
principles  as  he  was,  namely,  that  success  in  busi- 
ness or  professional  life  implies  fitness  for  public 
life.  We  have  no  other  standard.  The  present 
Cabinet  is  an  "exceptionally  good"  Cabinet. 
Many  of  its  members  are  millionaires. 

Some  of  them  owe  their  place  to  the  rule  that 
those  who  help  elect  a  President  are  entitled  to 
the  honor,  the  advertising,  or  the  "vindication/1 
of  high  public  office. 

That  is  to  say,  the  same  considerations  that  rule 
in  the  selection  of  Senators  rule  in  their  selection. 
They  were  recruited  from  the  class  from  which 
Senators  are  recruited.  I  can  not  say  the  mental 
level  of  the  Cabinet  is  above  that  of  the  Senate. 
Take  out  of  the  upper  house  its  two  strongest 
members,  its  two  weakest,  and  half  a  dozen  of  the 
average  sort,  and  you  construct  a  body  in  every 

119 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

way  equal  to  the  Cabinet  of  Mr.  Harding  in  intelli- 
gence and  public  morals. 

Most  of  them,  never  having  been  members  of 
the  upper  house,  have  not  suffered  from  the  de- 
preciation in  the  public  eye  which  attends  service 
in  the  legislative  branch.  They  come  rather  from 
the  wonderful  business  world. 

There  are,  moreover,  few  of  them  compared  to 
Senators.  Smallness  of  numbers  suggests  careful 
selection,  superior  qualifications. 

And  the  secrecy  of  Cabinet  meetings  makes 
them  impressive.  If  reporters  were  present,  the 
public  would  realize  that  the  Cabinet  as  a  Cabinet 
was  mostly  occupied  with  little  things. 

The  records  prove  it. 

The  biweekly  meetings  of  the  Cabinet  are  com- 
monly followed  by  the  announcement:  "The 
Cabinet  had  a  short  session  today.  Nothing  of 
importance  was  discussed";  or,  "Details  of  ad- 
ministration were  discussed."  Now,  of  course, 
reasons  of  state  may  occasionally  restrain  the 
disclosure  of  what  actually  was  the  subject  before 
the  Cabinet.  Yet  Mr.  Harding's  administration 
has  been  in  office  more  than  a  year,  and  how  many 
important  policies  has  it  adopted?  How  much 
wisdom  has  emerged  from  the  biweekly  meetings? 

Sample  announcements  of  the  Cabinet  meetings 
run  like  this:  "The  Cabinet  listened  to  the  Post- 
master General,  explaining  how  much  it  would 
facilitate  the  handling  of  the  mails  if  people  would 

120 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

distribute  the  mailing  of  their  letters  throughout 
the  day,  instead  of  keeping  most  of  them  to  mail 
late  in  the  afternoon  when  they  are  leaving  their 
offices.  The  Postmaster  General  pointed  out  that 
the  government  departments  were  offenders  in 
this  respect."  Useful;  but  why  should  the  whole 
nation  worry  about  who  advises  with  the  President 
over  the  inveterate  bad  habits  of  the  people  as 
letter  writers? 

Or  this:  "The  Cabinet  spent  an  hour  and  a 
half  today  discussing  what  to  do  with  the  property 
left  in  the  government's  hands  by  the  war.  There 
are  millions  of  dollars'  worth  of  such  property." 
A  mere  detail  of  administration,  but  it  came  be- 
fore the  Cabinet  as  a  whole  because  more  than  one 
department  was  left  in  control  of  the  property. 

Moreover,  you  may  estimate  the  importanceof 
cabinets  from  the  fact  that,  after  all,  every  admin* 
istration  takes  its  color  from  the  President.  Mr. 
Wilson's  administration  was  precisely  Mr.  Wilson. 
Mr.  Harding's  is  precisely  Mr.  Harding. 

Listen  to  the  experience  of  a  Cabinet  adviser. 
One  of  the  most  important  Secretaries  was  explain- 
ing  to  some  friends  a  critical  situation.  "But," 
interjected  one  of  the  listeners,  "does  President 
Harding  understand  that?"  "The  President," 
replied  the  Secretary,  "never  has  time  really  to 
understand  anything." 

And  remember  how  Secretary  Hughes  told  the 
President  that  the  Four  Power  Pact  covered  with 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

its  guarantees  the  home  islands  of  Japan,  and  how 
a  couple  of  days  later  Mr.  Harding  informed  the 
press  that  it  did  not  cover  the  home  islands  of 
Japan;  when  it  transpired  that  the  information  of 
Mr.  Hughes  on  this  point  had  effected  no  lodge- 
ment in  the  President's  mind. 

The  Presidential  mind;  that  is  the  bottle  neck 
through  which  everything  has  to  pass. 

Suppose  we  had  today  the  greatest  statesman 
that  this  country  has  ever  produced  as  Secretary 
of  State.  Let  us  say  Alexander  Hamilton,  for 
example.  What  could  Alexander  Hamilton  do  as 
the  head  of  Mr.  Harding's  Cabinet?  We  shall 
assume  that  Alexander  Hamilton  had  the  mind  to 
grasp  the  problem  of  this  country's  relations  to  the 
world  and  of  its  interest  in  the  world's  recovery 
from  the  havoc  and  the  hatreds  of  the  war,  and  the 
constructive  imagination  to  reach  a  solution  of  it. 
What  could  Alexander  Hamilton  do?  His  avenue 
of  approach  to  world  problems  would  be  Mr. 
Harding.  All  that  was  in  the  mind  of  Alexander 
Hamilton,  Secretary  of  State,  would  have  to  pass 
through  the  mind  of  Warren  G.  Harding,  Presi- 
dent, before  it  would  become  effective. 

The  passage  through  would  be  blocked  by  many 
obstacles,  for  Mr.  Harding  has  a  perfectly  conven- 
tional mind;  that  is  why  he  is  President.  One  of 
the  pictures  in  Mr.  Harding's  head  is  the  mechanis- 
tic, the  God's  Time  picture.  "  Things  left  to 
themselves  will  somehow  come  out  all  right." 

122 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

Another  is  the  racial  inferiority  complex.  "  Man  is 
inadequate  to  attempt  control  of  his  own  destiny. 
There  are  the  forces  to  be  considered."  A  third 
is  the  great  business-man  illusion.  Mr.  Morgan 
going  abroad  to  consider  reparations  may  accom- 
plish the  wonders  which  mere  statesmen  can  not. 
All  these  induce  avoidance  of  responsibility,  and 
Mr.  Harding  has  the  human  liking  for  avoiding 
responsibility.  Pressed  by  Mr.  Hamilton,  Mr. 
Harding  would  say:  "But  I  can  not  move  the 
Senate. ' '  Pressed  further,  he  would  say :  ' '  There 
is  Public  Opinion.  We  shall  lose  the  election  if  we 
become  involved  in  European  affairs.  You  and 
I  know  those  Allied  war  debts  are  worthless,  but 
how  can  we  make  the  people  realize  that  they  are 
worthless?" 

Like  the  rest  of  us,  Mr.  Harding  perhaps  has 
none  of  these  pictures  so  firmly  in  his  head  as  be- 
fore the  war;  but  the  damage  to  the  pictures  only 
makes  him  more  vacillating.  I  am  assuming  in 
all  this  that  Mr.  Hamilton  has  a  free  mind,  which 
he  had,  relatively,  when  he  operated  a  century 
and  a  half  ago.  At  that  time  he  had  not  to  think 
much  of  Public  Opinion  or  of  parties.  And  the 
mechanistic  theory  of  Progress,  that  things  come 
out  all  right  with  the  least  possible  human  inter- 
vention or  only  the  intervention  of  the  business 
man,  had  not  then  assumed  its  present  importance. 

"Mind,"  says  a  nameless  writer  in  the  London 
Nation,  "is  incorrigibly  creative."  It  has  created 

123 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

so  many  vast  illusions  like  those  above  in  the 
last  century  and  a  half  that  like  the  American 
spirit  in  Kipling's  poem: 

"  Elbowed  out  by  sloven  friends, 
It  camps,  at  sufferance,  on  the  stoop." 

Where  our  actual  Secretary's  mind  falls  short  of 
our  supposititious  Secretary's  mind  is  in  the  valu- 
able quality  of  common  sense.  I  am  even  prepared 
to  maintain  that  as  a  measure  of  reality  Mr. 
Hughes's  mind  is  distinctly  inferior  to  Mr.  Hard- 
ing's,  which  is  one  reason  why  he  never  did  become 
President  and  Mr.  Harding  did.  I  can  not  better 
explain  what  I  mean  than  on  the  basis  of  this 
quotation  from  a  recent  book  of  Mr.  Orage,  the 
British  critic: 

"Common  sense  is  the  community  of  the  senses 
or  faculties;  in  its  outcome  it  is  the  agreement  of 
their  reports.  A  thing  is  said  to  be  common  sense 
when  it  satisfies  the  heart,  the  mind,  the  emotion 
and  all  the  senses;  when,  in  fact,  it  satisfies  all  our 
various  criteria  of  reality." 

Mr.  Hughes  has  only  one  criterion  of  reality, 
his  mind,  which  has  been  developed  at  the  expense 
of  all  his  other  means  of  approach  to  the  truth. 
He  lives  in  a  region  of  facts,  principles,  and  logical 
deductions.  He  does  not  sense  anything.  And 
only  men  who  sense  reality  have  common  sense. 
For  Mr.  Hughes  facts  are  solid;  you  can  make 
two  nice,  orderly  little  piles  of  them  and  build  a 

124 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

logical  bridge  over  the  interval  between  them.  A 
true  statesman  builds  a  bridge  resting  on  nothing 
palpable,  and  nevertheless  he  crosses  over  it. 

Mr.  Hughes's  mind  operates  in  a  region  of  per- 
fect demonstration;  he  even  demonstrates  things 
to  himself.  A  true  statesman  never  succeeds  in 
demonstrating  anything  to  himself;  he  uses  demon- 
stration only  in  dealing  with  others.  Yet  he 
arrives  in  other  than  logical  ways  at  a  sureness  for 
himself  which  is  never  Mr.  Hughes's.  For  the 
Secretary  of  State  statesmanship  is  an  intellectual 
exercise,  for  the  true  statesman  it  is  the  exercise 
of  a  dozen  other  faculties.  An  extraordinary  but 
limited  mind,  Mr.  Hughes  impresses  us  as  the  boy 
lightning  calculator  does,  and  leaves  us  unsatisfied. 

Take  Mr.  Hughes's  handling  of  Mexican  rela- 
tions as  an  example  of  what  I  have  called  states- 
manship made  a  purely  intellectual  exercise.  The 
practical  result  which  was  to  be  desired  when  Mr. 
Hughes  took  office  was  stability  and  order  in  Mex- 
ico, the  safety  of  American  property  there,  and  a 
restoration  of  diplomatic  intercourse. 

Mr.  Hughes  does  not  seek  to  obtain  these  re- 
sults. Instead  he  works  out  the  following  problem : 
a  +  b  =  £,  in  which  a  is  the  fact  that  Carranza  had 
issued  a  decree  making  possible  the  confiscation  of 
American  property  in  Mexico,  b  is  the  principle  of 
international  law  that  at  the  basis  of  relations 
between  peoples  must  be  safety  of  alien  property, 
and  c  is  a  note  to  Mexico. 

125 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Mr.  Hughes  was  excited  over  the  perfection  of 
this  intellectual  operation.  He  read  his  note  with 
all  the  jubilance  of  the  Greek  philosopher  who, 
having  discovered  an  important  principle  of 
physics,  exclaimed:  "Eureka."  Mr.  Hughes's 
Eureka  is  always  a  piece  of  paper.  He  is  a  lawyer 
whose  triumphs  are  briefs  and  contracts. 

Now  the  facts  were  not  merely  that  Carranza 
had  made  an  offensive  gesture,  issuing  the  famous 
decree;  but  that  Mexico  had  not  confiscated  Ameri- 
can property  and  lived  in  such  fear  of  her  strong 
neighbor  that  she  was  never  likely  to  do  so,  that 
the  Mexican  supreme  court  had  ruled  confiscation 
to  be  illegal,  that  the  Obregon  government  was  as 
stable  and  as  good  a  government  as  Mexico  was 
likely  to  have,  and  that  it  was  to  our  interest  to 
support  it  morally  rather  than  encourage  further 
revolution  there.  They  all  pointed  to  recognition. 

The  validity  of  the  piece  of  paper  that  Mr. 
Hughes  demanded  of  Obregon  would  rest  upon 
international  law.  But  so  did  the  validity  of  our 
right  to  have  our  property  in  Mexico  respected. 
We  should  not  be  in  any  stronger  legal  position  to 
intervene  in  Mexico  if  she  violated  the  contract 
Mr.  Hughes  wanted,  than  if  she  violated  our 
property  rights  there  unfortified  by  such  a  piece  of 
paper.  Both  rested  on  one  and  the  same  law. 

Furthermore,  Mexico  being  weak  and  sensitive, 
an  arbitrary  demand  that  she  "take  the  pledge," 
such  as  Mr.  Hughes  made,  was  sure  to  offend  her 

126 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

pride,  and  delay  the  consummation  everyone 
wished — stability  across  the  border  and  a  restora- 
tion of  good  relations.  Yet  Mr.  Hughes  was  im- 
mensely satisfied  with  his  intellectual  exercise 
a  +  b  =  Cj  c  being  not  a  solution  of  the  Mexican 
problem,  which  at  this  writing  is  still  afar  off,  but 
a  piece  of  paper,  a  note  to  Mexico.  The  sheer 
logical  triumph  of  the  deduction  of  c  from  a  and  b 
is  to  Mr.  Hughes  an  end  in  itself. 

Now,  of  course,  it  is  not  wholly  overdevelopment 
of  mind  at  the  expense  of  the  other  criteria  of 
reality  which  leads  Mr.  Hughes  to  vain  exercises 
like  a  +  b  —  c.  He  has  what  a  recent  writer  has 
described  as  "an  inflamed  legal  sense. "  He  has, 
moreover,  by  an  association  of  ideas  all  his  own 
oddly  transferred  to  law  that  sacredness  with  which 
he  was  brought  up  to  regard  the  Bible.  "  Sanctity 
of  contracts,'*  is  his  favorite  phrase,  the  word 
"sanctity"  being  highly  significant.  He  has,  be- 
sides, Mr.  Harding  over  him,  and  the  Senate  to 
reckon  with.  And  in  the  case  of  Mexico  he  has 
as  a  fellow  Cabinet  member,  Mr.  Fall,  the  picture 
in  whose  head  is  of  a  "white  man"  teaching  a 
"greaser"  to  respect  him.  He  has  to  think  of 
winning  elections,  of  his  own  political  ambitions. 
All  these  inhibitory  influences  which  generally  pro- 
duce negation  do  not  estop  Mr.  Hughes.  His  mind 
is  too  vigorous  for  that.  It  pursues  its  way 
energetically  to  results,  such  as  a  +  b  =  c. 

Now,  of  course,  the  handling  of  Mexican  rela- 

127 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

tions  is  not  Mr.  Hughes's  major  achievement.  But 
even  his  major  achievement,  the  Washington  con- 
ference with  its  resultant  nine  pieces  of  paper,  was 
more  or  less  a  lawyer's  plea  in  avoidance. 

The  major  problem  which  confronted  Mr. 
Hughes  was  this:  The  Great  War  had  been  fol- 
lowed, as  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  aptly  says,  by  the  Petty 
Peace.  It  was  threatening,  and  still  threatens, 
to  flame  up  again.  The  problem  of  a  real  peace 
confronted  Mr.  Hughes,  because  Mr.  Wilson  had 
sought  to  establish  one  and  failed,  and  had  thus 
set  a  certain  standard  of  effort  for  his  successor. 
Moreover,  Mr.  Hughes  had  said  that  every  man, 
woman,  and  child  in  the  United  States  was 
vitally  interested  in  the  economic  recovery  of 
Europe. 

Mr.  Hughes  had  either  to  face  this  task  or  divert 
the  mind  of  the  court  to  some  other  issue.  He 
chose  to  find  his  a  +  b  =  c  elsewhere.  The  prob- 
lem of  establishing  peace  where  there  was  war  was 
difficult;  perhaps  it  was  too  hard  for  any  man,  but 
has  not  humanity — I  say  humanity  because  it  is 
Mr.  Harding's  favorite  word — has  not  humanity 
the  right  to  ask  of  its  statesmen  something  more 
than  timidity  and  avoidance?  The  problem  of 
establishing  peace  where  there  was  peace,  in  the 
Orient,  was  relatively  easy. 

The  war  had  left  the  great  sea  powers  with  ex- 
cessive navies  and  insupportable  naval  budgets. 
All  wanted  naval  limitation.  It  was  only  neces- 

128 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

sary  to  propose  an  agreement  for  reduction  to  have 
it  accepted. 

Even  the  dramatic  method  of  making  the  pro- 
posal, with  details  of  the  tonnage  to  be  scrapped, 
was  not  Mr.  Hughes's  idea.  Let  us  do  the  man  in 
the  White  House  justice.  He  conceived  it  on  the 
Mayflower ',  read  it  to  Senator  James  Watson  who 
was  with  him,  and  wirelessed  it  to  the  State 
Department. 

There  was  the  further  problem,  the  Anglo- 
Japanese  Alliance.  Mr.  Hughes  wanted  it  ended. 
Japan  and  England  wanted  it  substituted  by  a 
compact  which  should  be  signed  by  its  two 
signatories  and  the  United  States. 

All  that  Mr.  Hughes  had  to  do  to  establish  peace 
where  there  was  peace  was  to  offer  an  agreement 
upon  naval  armament  and  accept  the  Anglo- 
Japanese  plan  for  a  wider  pact  in  the  Pacific.  The 
details  would  involve  discussion,  but  the  success 
of  the  general  program  was  assured  in  advance. 

The  conference  was  called,  hurriedly,  because, 
as  Mr.  Harding  once  explained,  if  he  had  not 
hastened  someone  else  would  have  anticipated  him 
in  calling  it.  This  shows  how  obvious  was  the  ex- 
pedient. The  idea  of  naval  limitation  was  no 
more  original  than  the  idea  of  the  conference. 
Mr.  Borah  had  proposed  it.  Lord  Lee  had  pro- 
posed it,  in  the  British  Parliament.  The  idea  of 
the  Four  Power  Pact  was  made  in  England — it 
had  long  been  discussed  there — and  brought  over 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

by  Mr.,  now  Lord,  Balfour.  He  laid  it  at  Mr. 
Hughes's  feet. 

Mr.  Balfour  sought  no  triumphs.  They  should 
all  go  to  Mr.  Hughes.  He  has  the  art  of  incon- 
spicuousness,  the  result  of  many  generations  of 
fine  breeding.  As  you  saw  him  in  the  plenary 
sessions  clutching  the  lapels  of  his  coat  with  both 
hands  and  modestly  struggling  for  utterance  after 
an  immense  flow  of  words  from  our  chief  delegate, 
you  could  not  help  feeling  patriotic  pride  in  the 
contrast. 

Besides,  Mr.  Balfour  was  captivated.  He  be- 
came, for  the  nonce,  perfectly  American.  Mr. 
H.  Wickham  Steed  said  to  me,  hearing  the  chief 
British  delegate  speak:  "It  is  a  new  Balfour  at 
this  conference/1  Certainly  as  you  heard  the 
voice,  moved  and  moving,  emotional  perhaps  for 
the  first  time  in  his  life,  you  realized  that  it  was 
not  Mr.  Balfour,  "proceeding  on  his  faded  way" 
as  the  London  Nation  expressed  it,  who  was  speak- 
ing. It  was  Mr.  Balfour  as  he  might  be  at  a  great 
revival  meeting,  such  as  Mr.  Hughes  in  his  youth 
must  have  often  attended. 

On  the  Four  Power  Pact  the  best  comment  ever 
made  was  Mr.  Frank  Simonds's,  "It  was  invented 
to  save  the  British  Empire  from  committing 
bigamy. " 

The  results  of  the  Washington  conference  were 
substantial.  They  put  off  war  where  none  was 
threatening.  Perhaps  in  the  longer  future  they 

130 


ARTHUR    BALFOUR 


BOTTLE  NECK  OP  THE  CABINET 

will  be  seen  to  be  no  more  than  a  prolongation  of 
the  intent  of  the  Versailles  treaty,  confirming  the 
dichotomy  of  powers  which  that  instrument 
created.  Germany,  Russia,  and  China  were 
treated  as  outsiders  in  both  conferences. 

But  the  great  a  +  b  =  c  of  last  winter  left  peace 
where  there  is  war  still  unwritten.  The  problem 
which  "humanity"  posed  to  Mr.  Hughes  is  as  yet 
unattempted.  It  is  as  exigent  as  ever.  Im- 
mensely plausible  as  he  is,  events  have  a  way  of 
overtaking  him.  Remembering  what  happened  on 
election  night  in  1916,  I  think  one  cannot  sum  him 
up  better  than  by  saying  that  he  has  the  habit  of 
always  being  elected  in  the  early  returns.  As  in 
the  case  of  the  lightning  calculator,  after  you  have 
recovered  from  your  first  surprise  at  his  mental 
exhibition  you  are  inclined  to  ask,  "But  what  is 
the  good  of  it  all?'1 

The  two  most  important  advisers  to  the  Presi- 
dent in  the  existing  Cabinet  are  Mr.  Hughes  and 
Mr.  Hoover.  The  limitations  of  the  Secretary  of 
State  are  the  limitations  of  a  legalistic  mind.  The 
limitations  of  Mr.  Hoover  are  the  limitations  of  a 
scientific  mind.  Men,  considered  politically,  do 
not  behave  like  mathematical  factors  nor  like 
chemical  elements. 

Someone  asked  Mr.  Hoover  recently  why  he  sent 
corn  to  Russia  instead  of  wheat.  "Because,"  re- 
plied the  Secretary  of  Commerce  without  a  mo- 
ment's hesitation,  "for  one  dollar  I  can  buy  so 

131 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

many  calories*' — carrying  it  out  to  the  third 
decimal  place — "in  corn,  and  only  so  many*' — 
again  to  the  third  decimal  place — "in  wheat.  I  get 
about  twice  as  many  in  corn  as  in  wheat." 

Mr.  Hoover  is  at  his  best  in  feeding  a  famished 
population.  He  then  has  men  where  he  wants 
them — I  say  this  without  meaning  to  reflect  upon 
Mr.  Hoover's  humanitarian  impulses;  perhaps  I 
should  better  say  he  then  has  men  where  for  the 
free  operation  of  his  scientific  mind  he  requires  to 
have  them.  For  in  a  famine  men  become  mere 
chemical  retorts.  You  pour  into  them  a  certain 
number  of  calories.  Oxidization  produces  a  cer- 
tain energy.  And  the  exact  energy  necessary  to 
sustain  life  is  calculable. 

In  a  famine  men  cease  to  be  individuals.  They 
can  not  say, ' '  I  never  ate  corn.  I  do  not  know  how 
to  cook  corn.  I  do  not  like  corn."  They  behave 
in  perfectly  calculable  ways.  So  many  calories, 
oxidization;  so  much  energy. 

Conceive  a  society  in  which  results  were  always 
calculable:  so  many  men,  so  much  fuel,  so  much 
consequent  horsepower,  and  Mr.  Hoover  would 
make  for  it  an  admirable  benevolent  dictator;  for 
he  is  benevolent.  If  Bolshevism  at  its  most  com- 
plete exemplification  had  been  a  success  and  be- 
come the  order  of  the  world,  Mr.  Hoover  might 
have  made  a  great  head  of  a  state ;  with  labor  con- 
scripted and  food  conscripted,  all  you  would  have 
to  do  would  be  to  apply  the  food,  counted  in 

132 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

calories,  to  the  labor,  and  production  in  a  readily 
estimable  quantity  would  ensue.  I  am  not  trying 
to  suggest  that  this  represents  Mr.  Hoover's  ideal 
of  society;  it  surely  does  not.  I  am  only  saying 
that  this  is  the  kind  of  society  in  which  Mr.  Hoover 
would  develop  his  fullest  utility. 

Science  inevitably  reduces  man  to  the  calculable 
automaton,  otherwise  it  can  deduce  no  laws  about 
him; — such  as,  for  example,  the  legal  man,  a  fic- 
tion that  haunts  Mr.  Hughes's  brain;  the  chemical 
retort  man,  of  Mr.  Hoover's  mind;  the  economic 
man,  another  convenient  fiction;  the  scientific 
socialism  man,  another  pure  fiction,  derived  from 
the  economic  man  and  forming  the  basis  for 
Bolshevism  at  its  fullest  development. 

Now  if  Chemistry  should  somehow  acquire 
eccentricity,  so  that  two  elements  combined  in  a 
retort  would  sometimes  produce  one  result  and 
sometimes  another  totally  different,  the  chemist 
would  be  no  more  unsure  in  his  mind  than  is  Mr. 
Hoover,  operating  for  the  first  time  in  a  society  of 
free,  self-governing  men.  Or  perhaps  it  would  be  a 
better  analogy  to  say  that  if  the  chemist  when  he 
put  an  agent  into  a  retort  could  not  be  sure  what 
other  elements  were  already  in  it,  and  could  not 
tell  whether  the  result  would  be  an  explosion  or  a 
pleasant  and  useful  recombination,  he  would  be 
somewhat  in  the  position  of  Mr.  Hoover. 

You  will  observe  that  I  am  trying  to  dissociate 
the  real  Hoover  from  the  myth  Hoover,  always  a 

133 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

difficult  process,  which  may  require  years  for  its 
accomplishment.  I  do  not  pretend  that  this  is  the 
final  dissociation.  All  we  know  with  certainty  of 
the  real  Hoover  is  that  when  he  has  society  at  the 
starvation  line  and  can  say  "so  many  calories,  so 
much  energy/1  he  works  with  extraordinary 
sureness. 

When  he  operates  in  a  normal  society  he  takes 
his  chemical  agent  in  hand  and  consults  Mr. 
Harding,  Mr.  Daugherty,  or  Mr.  Weeks  as  to  what 
agents  there  are  in  the  political  retort,  and  whether 
the  placing  of  his  agent  in  with  them  will  produce 
an  explosion  or  a  profitable  recombination. 

So  you  see  the  practical  utility  of  his  mind  is 
conditioned  upon  the  minds  of  Mr.  Harding, 
Mr.  Weeks,  and  Mr.  Daugherty.  It  is  a  fertile 
mind,  which  invents,  however,  only  minor  chemi- 
cal reactions,  neither  he  nor  Mr.  Harding  being 
sure  enough  about  the  dirty  and  incalculable 
vessel  of  politics  to  know  when  an  explosion  may 
result,  and  neither  of  them  being  bold  enough  to 
take  chances. 

Mr.  Hughes,  Mr.  Hoover,  and  Mr.  Daugherty 
are  the  only  outstanding  figures  in  the  Cabinet. 
The  Attorney  General  lives  in  an  unreal  world  of 
his  own,  which  at  the  moment  of  this  writing 
threatens  to  come  tumbling  down  about  his  head. 

The  clue  to  Mr.  Daugherty's  world  is  found  in  a 
sentence  of  Thomas  Felder's  letter  apropos  of  the 
failure  to  collect  the  $25,000  fee  for  securing  the 

134 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

release  of  Charles  W.  Morse  from  prison,  in  which 
he  tells  how  he  associated  with  himself  Mr. 
Daugherty,  "who  stood  as  close  to  the  President 
as  any  other  lawyer  or  citizen  of  the  United 
States."  " Standing  close,"  men  may  laugh  at 
the  gods,  may  "take  the  cash  and  let  the  credit 
go."  It  is  a  world  of  little  things  without  any  to- 
morrow. Long  views  and  large  views  do  not  mat- 
ter. Forces?  Principles?  Perhaps,  but  the  main 
thing  is  all  men  should  "stand  close."  It  is  an 
immensely  human  world,  where  men  if  they  are  not 
masters  of  their  own  destiny  may  at  least  cheat 
fate  for  a  little  brief  hour,  if  only  they  remain  true 
to  each  other  no  matter  what  befalls. 

Mr.  Harding,  one  side  of  him  belongs  to  that 
world  of  Mr.  Daugherty's,  while  another  side  be- 
longs to  that  larger  political  world  where  morals, 
wrapped  in  vague  sentimental  words,  hold  sway. 
It  is  because  he  belongs  to  that  world  that  Mr. 
Daugherty  is  Attorney  General.  Mr.  Daugherty 
"stood  close "  to  Mr.  Harding  all  his  life.  " Stand- 
ing close"  creates  an  obligation.  Mr.  Harding, 
as  President,  must  in  return  "stand  close"  to 
Mr.  Daugherty. 

He  does  so.  To  the  caller  who  visited  him  when 
the  Morse-Felder  letters  were  coming  out  daily, 
and  who  was  apprehensive  of  the  consequences, 
the  President  said,  "You  don't  know  Harry 
Daugherty.  He  is  as  clean  and  honorable  a  man 
as  there  is  in  this  country."  In  such  a  world  as 

135 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

this,  your  friend  can  do  no  wrong.  Goldstein, 
who  received  the  $2,500  from  Lowden's  campaign 
manager,  belongs  to  it.  Therefore,  he  can  do  no 
wrong.  Therefore,  his  name  goes  from  the  White 
House  to  the  Senate  for  confirmation  as  Collector 
of  Internal  Revenue  at  St.  Louis. 

To  go  back  to  the  time  before  he  became  At- 
torney General,  Daugherty  practiced  law  in 
Columbus,  Ohio.  His  cases  came  to  him,  largely 
as  the  Morse  retainer  did,  because  he  "stood  close  " 
to  somebody,  to  the  President,  to  Senators,  to 
Governors  of  Ohio,  or  Legislatures  of  Ohio.  His 
was  not  a  highly  lucrative  practice,  for  Mr. 
Daugherty  is  one  of  the  few  relatively  poor  men  in 
the  present  Cabinet.  You  may  deduce  from  this 
circumstance  a  conclusion  as  favorable  as  that 
which  the  President,  who  knows  him  so  well,  does. 
I  am  concerned  only  in  presenting  the  facts.  At 
least  Mr.  Daugherty  did  not  grow  rich  out  of 
"standing  close. " 

Nor  did  he  accumulate  a  reputation.  When 
men  "stand  close "  those  who  are  outside  the 
circle  invariably  regard  them  with  a  certain  sus- 
picion. Your  professional  politician,  for  that  is 
what  Daugherty  was,  always  is  an  object  of  doubt. 
And  for  this  reason  he  always  seeks  what  is  techni- 
cally known  as  a  "vindication."  Conscious  of  his 
own  rectitude,  as  he  measures  it,  he  may  come  out 
of  office  cleared  in  the  world's  eyes,  and  with  a 
fine  title,  to  boot,  ready  for  life  upon  a  new  level. 

136 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

And  this  "  vindication "  sometimes  does  take 
place. 

I  have  no  doubt  that  Mr.  Daugherty  entered 
office  with  the  most  excellent  intentions.  He  had 
everything  to  gain  personally  from  "making  a 
record"  in  the  Attorney  Generalship,  a  title  and  a 
higher  standing  at  the  bar.  Moreover,  he  was  the 
loyal  friend  of  the  President  and  desired  the  success 
of  the  administration. 

But  it  is  not  so  easy.  You  cannot  one  moment 
by  " standing  close"  laugh  at  the  gods  and  the 
next  range  yourself  easily  and  commodiously  on 
the  side  of  the  gods.  The  gods  may  be  unkind 
even  to  those  who  mean  to  be  with  them  from  the 
outset,  establishing  their  feet  firmly  upon  logic 
or  upon  calories;  how  much  more  so  may  they  be 
with  those  who  would  suddenly  change  sides? 

At  least  it  is  a  matter  that  admits  of  no  com- 
promise. What  is  he  going  to  do  in  office  with 
those  who  "stood  close"  to  him  as  he  "stood 
close  "  to  President  Taft?  All  the  "close  standers  " 
turn  up  in  Washington.  For  example,  Mr.  Felder, 
who  "stood  close"  in  the  Morse  case  and  who 
perhaps  for  that  reason  appears  as  counsel  in  the 
Bosch-Magneto  case,  where  the  prosecution  moves 
slowly,  and  who  moreover  permits  himself  some 
indiscretions.  There  is  a  whole  army  of  "close 
standers."  There  are  the  prosecutions  that  move 
slowly.  Neither  circumstance  is  necessarily  signi- 
ficant. There  are  always  the  "close  standers." 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Prosecutions  always  move  slowly.  But  the  two 
circumstances  together! 

I  present  all  this  merely  to  show  what  kind  of 
adviser  the  Attorney  General  is,  his  limited  con- 
ception of  life  on  this  little  world,  and  life's,  per- 
haps temporary,  revenge  upon  him.  No  one  at 
this  writing  can  pass  judgment,  so  I  give,  along 
with  the  facts  and  the  appearances,  the  best  testi- 
monial that  a  man  can  have,  that  quoted  above 
from  the  President. 

In  physique  the  Attorney  General  is  burly, 
thick-necked,  his  eyes  are  unsteady,  his  face 
alternately  jovial  and  minatory, — I  should  say  he 
bluffed  effectively, — rough  in  personality,  a  physi- 
cal law  requiring  that  bodies  easily  cemented  to- 
gether, and  thus  " standing  close/'  should  not  have 
too  smooth  an  exterior.  His  view  of  the  world 
being  highly  personal,  his  instinctive  idea  of  office 
is  that  it,  too,  is  personal,  something  to  be  used, 
always  within  the  law,  to  aid  friends  and  punish 
enemies.  He  wrote  once  to  a  newspaper,  which 
was  opposing  his  appointment,  in  substance  that 
he  would  be  Attorney  General  in  spite  of  it  and  that 
he  had  a  long  memory. 

Secretary  of  War  Weeks  is  the  only  other 
general  adviser  of  Mr.  Harding  in  the  Cabinet. 
He  is  politically  minded.  Like  Mr.  Harding  he  is 
half  of  the  persuasion  of  Mr.  Daugherty  about 
organization,  and  half  of  the  other  persuasion 
about  the  sway  of  moral  forces.  All  in  all  he  is 

138 


ATTORNEY-GENERAL    H.   M.    DAUGHERTY 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

nearer  akin  mentally  to  the  President  than  any 
other  member  of  the  Cabinet,  but  with  more  in- 
dustry and  more  capacity  for  details  than  his 
chief.  He  is  of  the  clean  desk  tradition;  Mr. 
Harding  is  not. 

Half  politician  and  half  business  man,  he  inter- 
prets business  to  the  politician,  and  politics  to 
business.  He  is  a  middle  grounder.  He  quit 
banking  satisfied  with  a  moderate  fortune,  say- 
ing, "The  easiest  thing  I  ever  did  was  to  make 
money." 

His  bland  voice  and  mild  manner  indicate  the 
same  moderation  in  everything  that  he  showed 
in  making  money;  his  narrowing  eyes,  the  caution 
which  led  him  to  quit  banking  when  he  went  into 
politics. 

Politics  intrigues  him,  but  he  has  not  a  first- 
class  mind  for  it,  as  his  experiences  in  Massa- 
chusetts proved. 

Frank  to  the  utmost  limits  his  caution  will  per- 
mit, people  like  him,  but  not  passionately.  Men 
respect  his  ability,  but  they  do  not  feel  strongly 
about  it.  He  never  becomes  the  center  of  con- 
troversy, as  Daugherty  is,  as  Hoover  has  been,  and 
as  Hughes  may  at  any  time  be.  I  have  never 
seen  him  angry.  I  have  seen  him  enthusiastic.  A 
Laodicean  in  short. 

Secretary  Fall  hoped  to  be  one  of  the  chief 
advisers,  but  has  been  disappointed.  Mr.  Harding 
had  said  of  him,  "His  is  the  best  mind  in  the 

139 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Senate/'  but  he  has  found  other  minds  more  to 
his  liking  in  the  Cabinet. 

With  a  long  drooping  mustache,  he  looks  like  a 
stage  sheriff  of  the  Far  West  in  the  movies.  His  voice 
is  always  loud  and  angry .  He  has  the  frontiers-man '  s 
impatience.  From  his  kind  lynch  law  springs. 

He  wanted  to  lynch  Mexico.  When  he  entered 
the  Cabinet  he  said  to  his  Senate  friends,  "If 
they  don't  follow  me  on  Mexico  I  shall  resign." 
He  has  been  a  negative  rather  than  a  positive  force 
there  regarding  Mexico,  deviating  Mr.  Hughes  into 
the  ineffective  position  he  occupies. 

He  has  the  frontiers-man's  impatience  of  con- 
servation. Probably  he  is  right.  His  biggest 
contribution  to  his  country's  welfare  will  be  oil 
land  leases,  like  that  of  Teapot  Dome. 

The  Secretary  of  Agriculture,  Mr.  Wallace,  is  an 
excellent  technical  adviser,  as  unobtrusive  as 
experts  usually  are. 

The  Secretary  of  the  Navy,  Mr.  Denby,  with  his 
flabby  jowls  and  large  shapeless  mouth,  has  a  big 
heart,  and  more  enthusiasm  than  he  has  self- 
command,  judgment,  or  intelligence.  He  com- 
mitted political  suicide  cheerfully,  when  the 
Cannon  machine  in  the  House  fell  into  disfavor. 
He  would  do  anything  for  a  friend,  not  as  Mr. 
Daugherty  would  because  it  pays,  but  because  he 
is  a  friend.  A  cause  commands  an  equal  loyalty 
from  him.  Just  because  his  head  is  not  as  big  as 
his  heart  he  is  a  minor  factor. 

140 


BOTTLE  NECK  OF  THE  CABINET 

Mr.  Davis,  Secretary  of  Labor,  is  a  professional 
glad  hand  man,  appointed  because  the  admin- 
istration meant  to  extend  nothing  to  Labor  but  a 
glad  hand.  When  a  crisis  presents  itself  in  in- 
dustrial relations,  Mr.  Hoover,  who  spreads  him- 
self over  several  departments,  attends  to  it.  At 
the  conference  on  unemployment,  which  was 
Mr.  Hoover's,  the  best  and  only  example  of  the 
unemployed  present  was  the  Secretary  of  Labor. 


141 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR  OF  MUCH 
LITTLENESS 

WE  have  a  form  of  government  suited  to  effect 
the  will  of  a  simple  primitive  people,  a  people  with 
one  clear  aim.  When  we  are  all  of  one  mind  the 
government  works.  The  executive  represents  the 
general  intention,  Congress  represents  the  same 
intention.  The  party  in  power  owes  its  position 
to  the  thoroughness  with  which  it  expresses  the 
common  purpose.  Or,  if  you  go  back  further,  the 
structure  of  business  serves  the  same  social  aim. 

Now,  under  such  circumstances,  it  makes  little 
difference  where  authority  resides,  whether  there 
is  government  by  business,  or  government  by  par- 
ties, or  executive  domination,  or  whether  Congress  is 
the  ruling  branch.  The  result  is  the  same,  the  single 
purpose  of  the  community  finds  its  just  expression. 

And  so  it  was  in  the  blessed  nineties  to  which 
Mr.  Harding  would  have  us  return.  The  people 
were  united  upon  one  end,  the  rapid  appropriation 
of  the  virgin  wealth  of  this  continent  and  its  dis- 
tribution among  the  public,  and  they  had  no  doubt 

142 


GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR 

this  was  being  admirably  accomplished  by  the 
existing  business  structure.  Parties  and  govern- 
ments were  subsidiary.  The  system  worked. 

In  a  pioneer  society  waste  is  unimportant;  it 
may  even  be  economy.  Forests  are  cut  and  all  but 
the  choicest  wood  thrown  away.  They  are  not 
replanted.  While  they  are  so  plentiful  it  would  be 
a  waste  of  time  and  effort  to  use  the  poor  timber  or 
to  replace  the  felled  trees. 

In  a  similar  society  faulty  distribution,  which 
is  ordinarily  a  social  waste,  is  unimportant.  There 
is  plenty  for  all.  And  it  may  even  be  a  waste  of 
time  and  effort,  checking  accomplishment,  to  seek 
better  adjustments.  The  object  of  society  is  the 
rapid  exploitation  of  the  resources  nature  has  made 
available.  Everyone  gains  in  the  process.  Justice 
is  a  detail,  as  much  a  detail  as  is  the  inferior  timber 
left  to  rot. 

We  no  longer  have  the  unity  of  aim  of  a  pioneer 
society,  yet  we  have  not  readjusted  our  actual 
government  in  conformity  with  the  altered  social 
consciousness.  Instead  we  are  trying  to  readjust 
ourselves  to  a  practice  that  is  outworn.  Having 
ceased  to  be  pioneers,  becoming  various  and 
healthily  divided,  instead  of  making  our  system 
express  the  new  variety  in  our  life,  and  still  func- 
tion, we  are  trying  to  force  ourselves  by  heavy 
penalties  and  awful  bugaboos  back  into  that  unity 
tinder  which  our  system  does  work. 

And  when  I  say  that  we  have  a  form  of  govern- 

143 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

ment  suited  only  to  a  pioneer  society,  though  we 
have  ceased  to  be  a  pioneer  society,  let  no  one  think 
that  I  would  lay  a  profane  hand  upon  that  vener- 
ated instrument,  the  Constitution  of  the  United 
States.  I  am  thinking  only  of  the  Constitution's 
boasted  elasticity.  A  new  stretching  is  required,  to 
fit  a  larger  and  more  diversified  society  than  that  to 
which  we  have  hitherto  applied  it. 

For  a  simple,  primitive  people,  for  a  pioneer 
society  with  but  one  task  to  accomplish, — the 
appropriation  and  distribution  of  the  undeveloped 
resources  of  a  continent, — details  of  distribution 
being  unimportant  where  natural  wealth  was  so 
vast,  government  by  business  or  government  by 
parties  as  the  agents  of  business  served  admirably. 
The  essential  unity  which  is  not  to  be  found  in  our 
government  of  divided  powers  existed  in  the  single 
engrossing  aim  of  the  public. 

For  a  temporary  end,  like  the  common  defense, 
against  an  external  enemy  or  against  an  imagined 
internal  enemy,  concentration  upon  the  Executive 
also  serves.  The  unity  of  purpose  which  the  nation 
has  is  imported  into  the  government  through  ele- 
vating the  President  into  a  dominant  position.  In 
the  one  case  the  government  is  made  to  work  by 
putting  all  branches  of  it  under  control  of  one  au- 
thority outside  itself;  in  the  other,  by  upsetting  the 
nice  balance  which  the  Fathers  of  the  Constitution 
set  up  and,  under  the  fiction  of  party  authority, 
resorting  to  one  man  Government. 

144 


GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR 

But  what  happens  when  there  ceases  to  be  a 
single  aim,  when  the  fruits  of  the  earth  are  no 
longer  sufficient  to  go  around  generously  so  that 
no  one  need  question  his  share,  when  a  conflict  of 
interests  arises,  when  classes  begin  to  emerge,  when 
in  short  we  have  the  situation  which  exists  in 
America  today? 

Let  us  examine  for  a  moment  the  Executive  as  a 
source  of  unity  in  the  government  of  such  a  diver- 
gent society.  To  make  him  executive  minorities 
must  agree  upon  him.  He  must,  to  use  Mr.  Hard- 
ing as  an  illustration,  be  satisfactory  to  the  farmers 
with  one  point  of  view  and  to  Wall  Street  with 
another,  he  must  be  acceptable  to  the  Irish  Amer- 
icans and  to  the  German  Americans  and  to  several 
other  varieties  of  Americans,  he  must  take  the 
fence  between  those  who  believe  in  a  League  of 
Nations  and  those  who  hate  a  League  of  Nations, 
he  must  please  capital  and  at  the  same  time  not 
alienate  labor. 

Mr.  Harding  gave  a  glimpse  of  his  difficulties 
when  he  said  during  the  campaign,  "I  could  make 
better  speeches  than  these,  but  I  have  to  be  so 
careful."  The  greatest  common  divisor  of  all  the 
minorities  that  go  to  making  a  winning  national 
combination  must  be  neutral,  he  must  be  colorless, 
he  must  not  know  that  his  soul  is  his  own.  The 
greatest  common  divisor  of  all  the  elements  in 
the  nation's  political  consciousness  today  is  in- 
evitably a  Mr.  Harding.  We  shall  probably  have 

145 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

a  whole  series  of  Mr.  Hardings  in  the  White 
House. 

And  when  this  greatest  common  divisor  of  all  the 
classes  and  all  the  interests,  this  neutral,  colorless 
person  to  whom  no  one  can  find  any  objection, 
enters  the  White  House  does  he  represent  Labor? 
So  little  that  he  will  not  have  a  labor  man  in  his 
Cabinet.  Does  he  represent  Capital?  By  instinct, 
by  party  training,  by  preference,  yes,  but  capital  is 
so  divided  that  it  is  hard  to  represent,  and  the 
President,  like  the  candidate,  "has  to  be  so  care- 
ful/' Does  he  represent  the  farmers?  He  says  so, 
but  the  farmers  choose  to  be  represented  elsewhere, 
on  the  hill,  where  they  can  find  agents  whose  alle- 
giance is  not  so  divided. 

And  carefulness  does  not  end  upon  election. 
Once  a  candidate  always  a  candidate.  The  entire 
first  term  of  a  president  is  his  second  candidacy. 
His  second  term,  if  he  wins  one,  is  the  candidacy  of 
his  successor,  in  whose  election  he  is  vitally  inter- 
ested; for  the  continuance  of  his  party  in  power  is 
the  measure  of  public  approval  of  himself.  A 
president  who  is  the  greatest  common  divisor  of 
groups  and  interests  "must  always  be  so  careful" 
that  he  can  never  be  a  Roosevelt  or  a  Wilson. 

Recapitulating  the  experiences  of  other  peoples 
with  political  institutions,  we  have  quickly,  since 
our  discovery  of  one  man  rule,  run  upon  the  period 
of  little  kings.  The  Carolingians  have  followed 
close  upon  the  heels  of  the  great  Carl.  The  institu- 

146 


GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR 

tion  which  in  the  first  decade  of  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury was  a  wonderful  example  of  our  capacity  to 
adopt  the  rigors  of  a  written  constitution  to  our 
ends,  of  the  practical  genius  of  the  American  people, 
in  the  third  decade  of  the  twentieth  century  is 
already  dead. 

The  monarch  with  power,  not  the  mere  survival 
who  satisfies  the  instinct  for  the  picturesque,  for  the 
play  of  the  emotions  in  politics,  is  suited  to  an 
undifferentiated  people  pursuing  a  single  simple 
end ;  one  end,  one  man,  many  ends,  many  men  is  the 
rule.  The  greatest  common  divisor  of  such  masses 
of  men  as  inhabit  this  continent,  so  variously 
sprung,  so  variously  seeking  their  place  in  the  sun, 
is  something  that  has  to  be  so  careful  as  to  become 
a  nullity. 

There  is  no  reason  why  our  presidents  should  not 
become  like  all  single  heads  of  modern  civilized 
peoples,  largely  ornamental,  largely  links  with  the 
past,  symbols  to  stir  our  inherited  feelings  as  we 
watch  their  gracious  progress  through  the  movies. 
Mr.  Harding  is  headed  that  way  and  if  that  Provi- 
dence which  watches  over  American  destinies 
vouchsafes  him  to  us  for  eight  years  instead  of  only 
four,  the  Presidency  under  him  will  make  progress 
toward  a  place  alongside  monarchy  under  King 
George. 

Already,  in  the  habit  of  blaming  every  failure  and 
disappointment  upon  Congress,  we  see  signs  of  the 
growth  of  the  happy  belief  that  the  King  can  do 

147 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

no  wrong.    When  the  King  does  nothing  he  can  do 
no  wrong. 

There  is  no  reason  why  we  should  not  repeat  the 
experiences  of  peoples  who  have  gone  further  upon 
the  road  of  social  differentiation  than  we  have 
and  develop  like  them  parliamentary  government. 
By  this  I  do  not  mean  to  echo  the  nonsense  that 
has  been  written  about  having  the  Cabinet  officers 
sit  in  Congress. 

What  is  more  likely  to  come  is  a  new  shift  in  the 
balance,  a  new  manifestation  of  our  genius  for  the 
practical,  which  no  written  constitution  can  re- 
strain, which  will  place  the  initiative  in  the  legisla- 
tive branch,  whereas  I  have  said,  under  Mr. 
Harding  it  is  already  passing,  and  which  will  make 
Congress  rather  than  the  President  the  dominant 
factor  in  our  political  life. 

This  process  is  already  taking  place. 

When  President  Harding  asked  the  advice  of  the 
Senate  whether  he  should  revive  an  old  treaty  with 
Germany  suspended  by  the  war,  pointing  proudly 
to  the  tenderness  he  was  showing  the  partner  of  his 
political  joys,  he  conceded  an  authority  in  the 
legislative  branch  which  neither  the  Constitution 
nor  our  traditions  had  placed  there.  He  took  a 
step  toward  recognizing  the  prospective  dominance 
of  Congress.  It  was  one  of  many. 

It  is  a  long  distance,  as  political  institutions  are 
measured,  from  President  Wilson's  telling  the 
Senate  that  it  must  bow  to  his  will  even  in  dotting 

148 


GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR 

the  i's  and  crossing  the  t's  of  the  Versailles  Treaty, 
to  Mr.  Harding's  asking  the  Senate  what  was  its 
will  regarding  the  old  German  treaty.  Foreign 
relations  are  precisely  the  field  where  the  executive 
power  seems  by  the  Constitution  to  have  been 
most  clearly  established,  yet  it  is  just  here  that  the 
legislative  branch  has  made  its  most  remarkable 
advance  toward  a  dominating  position;  perhaps 
because  this  topic  gained  a  temporary  importance 
from  the  war  and  it  was  naturally  in  the  most 
significant  area  that  the  conflict  between  the  two 
branches  of  the  government  had  to  break  out. 

When  President  Harding  introduced  the  treaties 
and  pacts  resulting  from  the  Washington  Confer- 
ence into  the  Senate,  he  said  that  he  had  been  a 
Senator  and  knew  the  Senate  views,  and  that  all 
the  agreements  he  was  offering  for  ratification 
had  been  negotiated  with  scrupulous  regard  to  the 
Senate's  will.  And  he  pleaded  with  the  Senate  not 
to  disavow  the  Executive  and  impair  its  standing  in 
the  conduct  of  foreign  relations. 

No  more  complete  avowal  could  be  made  of  the 
dominant  position  which  the  Senate  has  come  to 
occupy  in  the  diplomatic  affairs  of  the  country. 

In  the  field  where  he  was  supposed  legally  to 
have  the  initiative  the  President  became  expressly 
the  agent  of  the  Senate.  The  Senate  laid  out  the 
limits  of  policy  and  the  Executive  scrupulously,  so 
he  said,  observed  those  limits. 

This  speech  of  Mr.  Harding's,  like  his  consulting 

149 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

the  Senate  in  advance  upon  the  reviving  of  the 
German  treaty,  is  one  of  the  significant  evidences 
of  the  shift  of  power  that  is  taking  place,  away  from 
the  Executive  toward  the  Legislative.  It  did  not 
attract  the  attention  it  deserved  because  our  minds 
are  still  full  of  the  past  when  the  Presidency  was  a 
great  office  tinder  Wilson  and  Roosevelt.  We  read 
of  Mr.  Harding's  going  to  the  hill  to  tell  Congress 
what  it  must  do,  and  we  ignore  the  fact  that  he 
always  does  so  when  Congress  sends  for  him,  acting 
as  their  agent. 

The  King  still  makes  his  speech  to  Parliament, 
though  the  speech  is  written  by  the  ministers. 
They  are  his  ministers,  though  Parliament  selects 
them.  The  power  of  the  King  is  a  convenient  fic- 
tion. The  power  of  the  President  will  always 
remain  a  convenient  fiction,  even  if  it  should 
come  to  have  no  more  substance  than  that  of  the 
King. 

In  truth  it  has  been  the  Senate  not  the  Executive 
that  has  been  determining  our  foreign  policy  in  its 
broader  outlines  for  more  than  two  years.  The 
Secretary  of  State  works  out  the  details.  But  the 
Senate  says  "thus  far  shalt  thou  go  and  no  farther. " 
And  when  the  Secretary  of  State  has  gone  farther, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  peace  treaty  with  Germany, 
the  Senate  has  amended  his  work.  So  Senator 
Penrose  did  not  exaggerate,  when  he  said  apropos 
of  Mr.  Hughes's  appointment,  "  It  makes  no  differ- 
ence who  is  Secretary  of  State,  th  e  Senate  will  make 

150 


GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR 

the  foreign  policy/1  The  President  has  only  re- 
cently declared  that  it  has  done  so. 

So  gradual  has  been  the  extension  of  the  Senate's 
prerogative  that  few  realize  how  far  it  has  gone. 
So  low  had  the  Senate  sunk  in  public  estimation 
during  the  war  that  it  did  not  occur  to  President 
Wilson  that  he  might  not  safely  ignore  it  in  making 
peace.  He  appointed  no  Senators  to  the  delegation 
which  went  to  Paris.  He  did  not  consult  the  Sen- 
ate during  the  negotiations  nor  did  he  ever  take 
pains  to  keep  the  Senate  informed.  He  proceeded 
on  the  theory  that  he  might  sign  treaties  with 
perfect  confidence  that  the  Senate  would  accept 
them  unquestioningly.  And  so  impressed  was  the 
country  at  the  time  with  the  power  of  the  Presi- 
dency that  Mr.  Wilson's  tacit  assumption  of  dicta- 
torial power  over  Congress  was  generally  taken  as 
a  matter  of  course. 

All  this  was  changed  under  Mr.  Wilson's  succes- 
sor. One  half  of  Mr.  Harding's  delegation  to  the 
Washington  Conference  was  made  up  of  Senators. 
At  every  step  of  the  negotiation  the  Senate's 
susceptibilities  were  borne  in  mind.  No  commit- 
ment was  entered  into  which  would  exceed  the 
limits  set  by  the  Senate  to  the  involvement  of  this 
country  abroad.  Almost  daily  Mr.  President 
consulted  with  Senators  and  explained  to  them 
what  the  American  Commission  was  doing.  Prac- 
tically the  Executive  became  the  agent  of  the  Sen- 
ate in  foreign  relations  and  in  the  end  he  told  the 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Senate  what  a  good  and  faithful  servant  he  had 
been  and  how  scrupulously  he  had  respected  its 
will. 

It  was  only  superficially  that  Secretary  Hughes 
was  the  outstanding  figure  of  the  Conference.  The 
really  outstanding  figure  was  the  Senate.  Mr. 
Hughes  was  not  free.  Mr.  Harding  was  not  free. 
The  controlling  factor  was  the  Senate.  The  treaties 
had  to  be  acceptable  to  the  Senate,  whose  views 
were  known  in  advance.  No  theory  of  party  au- 
thority, of  executive  domination,  would  save  them 
if  they  contravened  the  Senatorial  policy  disclosed 
in  the  Versailles  Treaty  debate  and  insisted  upon 
anew  to  Mr.  Hughes's  grievous  disappointment 
when  the  reservation  was  attached  to  the  separate 
peace  with  Germany.  When  it  was  realized  that 
Senate  opposition  to  the  Four  Power  Pact  had  been 
courted  through  the  inadvertent  guaranty  of  the 
home  islands  of  Japan,  the  agreement  was  hastily 
modified  to  meet  the  Senate's  views.  President 
and  Secretary  of  State  behaved  at  this  juncture 
like  a  couple  of  clerks  caught  by  their  employer  in  a 
capital  error. 

And  even  Mr.  Hughes's  prominence  was  half 
accidental.  The  Senate  is  strong  in  position  but 
weak  in  men.  Mr.  Hughes  is  vastly  Mr.  Lodge's 
superior  in  mind,  in  character,  and  in  personality. 
Suppose  the  situation  reversed,  suppose  the  Senate 
rich  in  leadership,  suppose  it  were  Mr.  Aldrich 
instead  of  Mr.  Lodge  who  sat  with  Mr.  Hughes  in 


GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR 

the  Commission,  then  the  Senate  which  had  made 
the  foreign  policy  in  its  broad  outlines  would  itself 
have  filled  in  the  details,  and  a  Senator  instead  of 
the  Secretary  of  State  would  have  been  the  chief 
figure  of  the  American  delegation. 

Where  did  Mr.  Harding 's  plan  of  settling  inter- 
national affairs  by  conferences  originate?  You  will 
find  it  in  a  document  which  Senator  Knox  brought 
out  to  Marion,  Ohio,  in  January,  1921.  Reports 
had  come  to  Washington  that  Mr.  Harding's 
Association  of  Nations,  which  was  being  discussed 
with  the  best  minds  was  only  Mr.  Wilson's  league 
re-cast.  The  leaders  of  the  Senate  met  and  agreed 
on  a  policy.  Mr.  Knox  took  it  to  the  President 
elect.  Instead  of  a  formally  organized  association 
there  was  to  be  nothing  more  than  international 
conferences  and  the  appointment  of  international 
commissions  as  the  occasion  for  them  arose.  Mr. 
Harding's  policy  is  the  Senate's  policy. 

The  Senate's  victory  has  been  complete.  The 
United  States  did  not  ratify  the  Versailles  Treaty. 
It  did  not  enter  the  League  of  Nations.  It  did 
make  a  separate  treaty  of  peace  with  Germany. 
It  did  not  appoint  a  member  of  the  Reparations 
Commission — the  Senate's  reservation  to  Mr. 
Hughes's  treaty  keeping  that  question  in  the  con- 
trol of  Congress. 

Senatorial  control  of  foreign  relations  seems  now 
to  be  firmly  established.  No  future  president, 
after  Mr.  Wilson's  experiences  with  the  Versailles 

153 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Treaty  and  Mr.  Harding's  with  the  Four  Power 
Pact,  will  negotiate  important  foreign  engagements 
without  informing  himself  fully  of  the  Senate's 
will.  And  the  principle  has  been  established  that 
the  Senate  shall  be  directly  represented  on  Amer- 
ican delegations,  to  world  conferences. 

I  recall  this  history  of  the  recent  conflict  between 
the  Executive  and  the  Senate  over  foreign  relations 
to  show  how  completely  in  this  important  field  the 
theory  of  presidential  dominance  has  broken  down 
and  been  replaced  by  the  practice  of  senatorial 
dominance.  No  amendment  to  the  constitution 
has  taken  place.  The  President  still  acts  "with  the 
advice  and  consent  of  the  Senate."  Only  now  he 
takes  the  advice  first  so  as  to  be  sure  of  the  consent 
afterward,  instead  of  acting  first  and  obtaining  the 
advice  and  consent  afterward. 

The  Senate  has  been  aided  in  this  conflict  with 
the  Executive  by  the  constitutional  requirement  of 
a  two-thirds  majority  for  the  ratification  of  a 
treaty.  If  a  majority  would  suffice,  a  President, 
by  invoking  the  claims  of  party,  by  organizing  pub- 
lic opinion,  by  judiciously  using  patronage  might 
put  his  agreements  with  foreign  nations  through. 
But  a  two-thirds  vote  is  not  to  be  obtained  by  these 
methods ;  the  only  practicable  means  is  to  accept  the 
Senate's  views  of  foreign  policy  and  conform  to  it. 

As  soon  as  foreign  relations  became  sufficiently 
important  to  fight  over  the  conflict  was  inevitable 
and  the  victory  of  the  Senate  certain. 

154 


GREATEST  COMMON  DIVISOR 

The  conflict  between  the  two  branches  of  the 
Government  will  not  stop  with  this  victory  of  the 
Senate.  It  has  always  been  present  and  probably 
always  will  be.  The  importance  of  the  domestic 
problems  that  the  war  left  will  cause  Congress  to 
insist  upon  a  free  hand  to  make  domestic  policies. 
In  the  past  Congress  busied  itself  about  little 
except  the  distribution  of  moneys  for  public  build- 
ings and  river  and  harbor  improvement.  The 
handling  of  these  f unds  the  legislative  branch  kept 
out  of  executive  control. 

Now  public  buildings  and  improvements  have 
become  relatively  unimportant.  But  the  deepest 
economic  interests  of  constituents  are  involved. 
Formerly  taxes  were  small  and  lightly  regarded. 
Today  their  incidence  is  the  subject  of  a  sharp 
dispute  between  classes  and  industries. 

Furthermore  the  use  of  government  credit  for 
certain  economic  ends,  such  as  those  favored  by  the 
farmers,  will  cause  a  clash  between  sections,  groups, 
industries,  and  strata  of  society.  Policies  of  large 
importance  will  have  to  be  adopted  about  which 
there  will  be  a  vast  difference  of  opinion.  The 
divergent  interests  cannot  be  represented  in  the 
White  House,  for  the  Presidency  embodies  the 
compromise  of  all  the  interests.  They  will  have  to 
find  their  voice  in  Congress.  When  they  find  their 
voice  the  great  policies  will  be  made.  And  where 
the  great  policies  will  be  made  there  the  power 
will  be. 


CHAPTER  IX 

CONGRESS    AT    LAST    WITH    SOMETHING   TO    DO   HAS 
NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

WHEN  Lazarus  was  raised  from  the  dead  it  took 
him  a  long  time  to  find  out  that  he  was  again  alive. 
His  legs  were  stiff  from  being  so  long  extended. 
His  arms  were  cramped  from  being  decently  ar- 
ranged across  his  breast.  The  circulation  starting 
in  his  members  produced  disagreeable  sensations 
which  recalled  his  mortal  illness  and  the  pains  of 
dissolution.  The  last  thing  that  this  discomfort 
suggested  was  life. 

Even  thus  it  is  with  Congress,  it  has  been  so  long 
dead  that  it  is  hard  for  it  to  realize  that  it  has  once 
again  come  to  life.  It  suffers  from  various  un- 
pleasant sensations  in  its  members,  from  blocs, 
from  lack  of  leadership,  from  indifference  to  party, 
from  factionalism,  from  individualism,  from  in- 
capacity to  do  business.  They  are  all  vaguely 
reminiscent  of  the  pains  of  dissolution.  On  the 
dissolution  theory  they  are  decent  and  explicable, 
for  death  is  always  decent  and  explicable. 

As  signs  of  life  they  are  scandalous,  and  every- 

156 


SOMETHING  TO  DO— NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

body  is  scandalized  over  them  for  fear  that  a  vital 
Congress  will  be  something  new  to  reckon  with. 

If  Congress  does  realize  that  it  has  waked  from 
the  dead,  who  will  be  worse  scandalized  than  the 
senile  persons  whom  the  newspapers  respectfully 
call  its  "leaders"?  What  more  threatening  spec- 
tacle for  second  childhood  is  there  than  first  child- 
hood? 

Suppose  Congress  were  again  a  lusty  and  vigor- 
ous creature  with  the  blood  of  youth  in  its  veins, 
how  long  would  Henry  Cabot  Lodge,  aged  seventy- 
two,  remain  leader  of  the  Senate?  Lodge,  the  iras- 
cible old  man,  with  worn  nerves,  who  claps  his 
hands  for  the  Senate  pages  as  if  they  were  not  of  the 
same  flesh  and  blood  with  himself,  and  who  would, 
if  he  could  follow  his  instincts,  clap  his  hands  in  the 
same  way  to  summon  the  majority  Senators,  the 
recluse  who  is  kept  alive  by  old  servants  who  under- 
stand and  anticipate  every  whim,  to  enjoy  greed- 
ily the  petty  distinctions  that  have  come  to  him 
late  because  the  Senate  itself  was  more  than  half 
dead? 

And  who  would  be  worse  scandalized  than  the 
ancient  committee  chairman,  some  with  one  foot 
in  the  grave?  At  one  time  in  the  first  year  of  Mr. 
Harding' s  administration  the  important  chairman- 
ships in  the  Senate  were  disposed  thus :  Finance,  the 
most  powerful  committee,  Senator  Penrose,  a  dy- 
ing man;  Foreign  Relations,  Senator  Lodge,  72; 
Interstate  Commerce,  Senator  Cummins,  72,  and 

157 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

broken  with  illness;  Judiciary,  Senator  Nelson, 
79  and  living  back  in  the  Civil  War  in  which 
he  served  as  a  private;  Immigration,  Senator 
Colt,  76. 

Suppose  Congress  should  come  to  life  and  repre- 
sent the  real  interests  of  the  various  sections, 
classes,  and,  let  us  say,  kinds  of  property  and 
business  in  this  country — how  long  would  the 
Senate  remain  such  a  pleasant  place  to  die  in? 

When  these  old  gentlemen  made  their  successful 
fight  upon  President  Wilson  they  signed  their  own 
death  warrants,  and  began  putting  an  end  to  the 
system  that  made  their  tenure  possible.  Only  a 
Congress  which  had  long  been  a  subject  of  public 
contempt  could  have  fallen  into  and  could  have 
remained  in  their  hands.  Granted  that  Congress 
is  negligible,  it  makes  no  difference  who  sits  in 
it  or  how  decrepit  its  leadership. 

But  shift  power  once  more  to  the  legislative,  and 
the  various  conflicting  interests  throughout  the 
country  will  grasp  for  the  offices  now  in  enfeebled 
hands.  And  by  taking  predominance  in  foreign 
relations  away  from  the  Executive  ai^d  transferring 
it  to  themselves,  the  elderly  and  infirm  "leaders," 
who  have  been  tolerated  out  of  half  contempt,  have 
started  the  avalanche  of  authority  in  their  direction. 
It  will  sweep  them  off  their  unsteady  feet. 

Let  us  examine  what  they  have  done.  When 
they  opposed  Mr.  Wilson  on  the  Versailles  Treaty 
they  established  the  power  of  the  Senate  to  mark 

158 


SOMETHING  TO  DO— NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

out  broadly  the  foreign  policy  of  the  United  States, 
a  dangerous  enough  beginning  for  persons  who 
were  merely  tolerated  because  Congress  was  nearly 
negligible  and  it  was  a  matter  of  little  difference  to 
the  public  who  its  managers  were.  But  when  they 
altered  Mr.  Harding's  treaties  they  also  denied  the 
authority  of  the  Executive  as  the  head  of  his  party 
to  align  them  in  support  of  his  program. 

Party  authority  vested  in  the  Executive  thus 
impaired,  it  was  not  long  before  the  representatives 
of  agricultural  states  also  denied  it,  and  began  to 
take  their  orders  from  the  Farm  Bureau  Federa- 
tion instead  of  from  the  White  House.  Then  the 
House  leaders  in  open  defiance  of  the  "head  of 
the  party"  prepared  and  reported  a  soldiers' 
bonus  bill  which  contravened  the  express  purposes 
of  the  Executive  regarding  this  legislation.  Here 
we  have  the  organization  joining  with  the  farm 
bloc  in  declaring  the  legislature  to  be  its  own  master. 

But  on  what  do  the  octogenarian  feet  of  Mr. 
Lodge  and  Mr.  Cummins,  and  Mr.  Colt  and  Mr. 
Nelson,  and  the  others,  rest  except  upon  party 
authority?  Not  upon  representing  any  real  or 
vital  principle  in  the  national  life.  Not  upon  any 
force  of  intelligence  or  personality. 

They  move  in  a  region  of  fictions.  They  repre- 
sent the  Republican  party,  when  there  is  no  Re- 
publican party,  no  union  on  principles,  no  stable 
body  of  voters,  no  discipline,  no  clear  social  end  to 
be  served. 

159 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

When  votes  for  legislation  must  be  had,  Senator 
James  Watson  circulates  about  among  the  faith- 
less pleading  in  the  name  of  party  loyalty — as  well 
talk  of  fealty  to  Jupiter  in  the  capitol  of  the  Popes ! 

In  extremities  the  President,  as  "head  of  his 
party,"  is  brought  on  the  scene, — for  all  the  world 
like  the  practice  of  a  certain  cult  which  long  after 
its  founder  was  dead  used  to  dress  up  a  lay  figure 
to  resemble  him  and  drive  it  about  the  market- 
place, to  reassure  the  faithful  and  confirm  the  influ- 
ence of  the  priests.  Mr.  Harding  is  alive  enough, 
but  the  "head  of  his  party"  is  dead  and  a  mere 
fiction  of  priests  like  "Jim"  Watson. 

Power  has  passed  or  is  passing  from  the  Execu- 
tive and  has  found  no  one  in  Congress  to  receive  it. 
The  arrival  of  power  causes  as  much  consternation 
on  the  hill  as  the  outbreak  of  war  does  among  the 
incompetent  swivel  chair  bureaucrats  of  an  army  in 
a  nation  that  has  been  long  at  peace. 

Power  is  passing  to  Congress  because  Congress 
says  who  shall  pay  the  taxes  and  who  may  use  the 
public  credit.  Where  there  was  one  interest  a 
generation  ago,  there  are  many  interests  today, 
each  trying  to  place  the  burden  of  taxation  upon 
others  and  reaching  for  the  credit  itself.  Taxation 
and  credit  are  the  big  stakes  today  and  Congress 
has  them  in  its  atrophied  grasp. 

The  question  what  is  the  matter  with  Congress 
has  received  more  answers  than  any  other  question 
asked  about  American  institutions.  For  almost  a 

160 


SENATOR   JAMES    E.    WATSON    OF    INDIANA 


SOMETHING  TO  DO— NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

generation  the  national  legislature  has  been  re- 
garded as  the  one  great  failure  in  self  government. 
For  years  it  has  been  the  home  of  small  men  con- 
cerned with  petty  things  which  it  approached  in  a 
petty  spirit,  incompetent,  wasteful,  and  hypocriti- 
cal, a  trial  to  the  Executive,  almost  a  plague  to  the 
country.  It  has  shared  with  state  legislatures  and 
municipal  boards  of  aldermen  the  impatience  of 
the  people.  In  spite  of  searchings  of  the  public 
conscience  it  has  gone  from  bad  to  worse  till  it  is 
at  its  lowest  point  today,  in  personnel,  in  organiza- 
tion, in  capacity  to  transact  business. 

What  has  brought  Congress  to  this  state  has 
been  the  unimportance  of  its  work,  "  doing  such 
little  things/*  as  Mr.  Root  said  after  his  six  years 
in  the  Senate.  Natural  economy  prevents  the 
sending  of  a  man  on  a  boy's  errand  even  if  the  man 
would  go. 

The  great  power  which  legislatures  have,  that 
over  the  public  purse,  has  not  been  of  enough  im- 
portance to  make  Congress  a  great  legislature. 
Taxes  were  light  and  before  the  war  fell  so  in- 
directly that  the  public  gave  them  little  attention. 
The  control  of  the  budget  virtually  passed  out  of 
the  hands  of  Congress,  for  executive  departments 
habitually  exceeded  their  appropriations  and  Con- 
gress always  made  up  the  deficiencies.  There  was 
no  tax  upon  incomes.  Taxpayers  were  indifferent. 
A  few  hundred  millions  more  or  less  was  of  no 
account. 

11  161 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Dispensations  to  business  in  the  shape  of  pro- 
tective duties  upon  imports,  a  form  of  taxation 
which  once  made  Congress  a  dominant  factor  in 
national  life,  had  become  steadily  less  important 
as  American  industry  grew  strong  enough  to  hold 
its  own  market  against  competition  and  to  com- 
pete itself  in  other  markets.  With  the  subsidence 
of  the  tariff  as  an  issue  Congress  lost  its  last  power 
to  impose  taxes  in  which  the  country  was  deeply 
interested.  Where  the  control  of  the  public  purse 
and  taxes  are  unimportant,  legislatures  are  weak, 
unless  executive  authority  is  vested  in  a  Cabinet 
formed  from  among  their  members. 

With  the  enfeeblement  of  Congress  through  the 
growing  unimportance  of  the  taxing  power,  its 
great  function,  came  the  tendency  to  magnify  the 
Executive.  Power  has  to  go  somewhere,  and  it 
went  down  Pennsylvania  Avenue.  And  this  move- 
ment coincided  with  the  development  of  centraliza- 
tion. Congress,  which  was  full  of  the  spirit  of  local- 
ism, was  not  a  perfect  instrument  of  centralization. 
The  Executive  was. 

To  elevate  the  President  it  was  necessary  to 
depress  Congress.  It  became  the  fashion  to  speak 
sneeringly  of  the  Legislative  branch,  to  sympathize 
with  presidents  who  "had  Congress  on  their  hands, 
to  write  of  "the  shame  of  the  Senate, "  and  when 
any  issue  existed  between  the  two  parts  of  the 
government  to  throw  the  force  of  public  opinion 
on  the  side  of  the  executive.  The  press  printed 

162 


SOMETHING  TO  DO— NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

endless  criticism  of  the  Senate  and  the  House. 
Theories  of  government  were  invented  to  reduce 
Congress  to  a  subordinate  place. 

Meanwhile  Congress,  having  regard  for  the 
character  of  its  membership,  was  agreed  that  in- 
competence should  suffer  no  disabilities.  All  that 
was  required  for  political  preferment  within  it  was 
political  longevity. 

The  seniority  rule,  by  which  committee  chair- 
manships went  not  to  ability  but  to  long  service, 
favored  mediocrity  and  second  childhood.  Even 
more,  incompetence  banded  together  jealously  to 
protect  itself  against  competence  and  shunted  it 
into  minor  assignments.  While  the  public  was 
regarding  Congress  with  contempt  Congress  was 
well  satisfied  to  make  itself  contemptible. 

Suppose  we  had  developed  a  capacity  for  breed- 
ing statesmen  in  this  country,  which  we  have  not, 
would  any  man  of  first-class  talents  seek  a  public 
career  in  such  an  institution  as  I  have  described? 
In  the  first  place,  the  people  were  visiting  Congress 
with  indifference,  or  worse  than  indifference,  and 
ambition  will  not  serve  under  indifference.  In  the 
next  place  that  great  power  which  makes  legisla- 
tures dominant,  the  power  to  tax  and  to  distribute 
the  fruits  of  taxation,  had  become  temporarily 
unimportant;  and  again,  Congress  itself  was  or- 
ganized for  self-protection  against  brains  and 
character. 

Senator  Root  quit  the  Senate  in  disgust.  Sena- 

163 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

tor  Kenyon  has  just  followed  his  example  in  even 
deeper  disgust.  A  Tammany  Congressman  after 
one  term  said,  "They  tie  horses  to  Congressmen 
in  Washington.*' 

Congress  is  upon  the  whole  a  faithful  reflection 
of  the  American  political  consciousness.  Democ- 
racy is  a  relatively  new  thing.  It  has  not  taken 
hold  of  the  minds  and  hearts  of  men.  Shadowy  and 
half -unconscious  faiths  dispute  its  place.  De  Gour- 
mont  writing  of  the  persistence  of  Paganism  in 
Catholicism,  says  that  no  religion  ever  dies  but 
lives  on  in  its  successor.  So  no  government  ever 
dies  but  lives  on  in  its  successor.  Why  take  the 
trouble  to  govern  yourselves  when  your  vital  inter- 
ests are  so  well  directed  by  the  higher  governments, 
of  Progress,  of  economic  Forces,  of  heroes  and  cap- 
tains of  industry  who  ruled  by  a  sort  of  divine 
right?  The  less  you  try  to  muddle  through  by 
means  of  poor  human  instruments  in  this  well- 
ordered  world  the  better. 

For  the  limited  tasks  of  self-government,  why 
should  special  talents  be  required?  We  are  still 
near  enough  the  pioneer  age  to  adhere  to  pioneer 
conceptions.  Roosevelt,  unfortunately,  is  the 
national  ideal. 

We  look  hopefully  for  great  amateurs  like  him 
among  insurance  agents,  building  contractors, 
lawyers,  country  editors,  bankers,  retiring,  with 
modest  fortunes  made,  into  public  life.  We  put 
the  jack  of  all  trades  everywhere.  Into  the  Presi- 

164 


SOMETHING  TO  DO— NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

dency — and  I  don't  know  why  we  should  not  in 
that  office,  for  it  is  a  waste  of  material  and  a  mis- 
direction of  effort  in  self-government  to  throw  away 
a  first-class  public  man  on  a  four-year  job.  Into 
the  Senate  and  the  House,  into  the  Cabinet,  where 
a  lawyer  without  previous  experience  of  interna- 
tional affairs  conducts  our  foreign  relations  in  the 
most  difficult  period  of  the  world's  history,  match- 
ing the  power  of  his  country  against  the  wits  of 
other  countries'  practiced  representatives,  and  thus 
obtaining  a  certain  forbearance  of  their  extreme 
skill. 

Into  the  diplomatic  posts,  where  an  editor, 
Colonel  Harvey,  noted  only  for  his  audacity,  holds 
the  most  important  ambassadorship.  Those  who 
have  seen  the  Colonel  at  meetings  of  the  Supreme 
Council  tell  the  amazing  story  that  he  was  a  silent 
and  uneasy  figure  in  the  conferences  of  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  and  Mr.  Briand,  perhaps  because  he  is  only 
an  observer,  perhaps  also  because  he  was  in  the 
company  of  practiced  statesmen  and  diplomats. 

However,  our  system  has  its  compensations. 
The  picture  of  the  robustious  Colonel  uneasy  in 
Zion  is  one  of  them. 

In  another  great  diplomatic  post  is  Mr.  Richard 
Washburn  Child,  a  quantity  producer  of  fiction, 
or  sort  of  literary  Henry  Ford.  In  another,  Paris, 
the  second  most  important  in  the  world,  Mr.  My- 
ron Herrick,  a  retired  business  man.  Senator 
Foraker  said  of  him,  at  a  critical  moment  of  his 

165 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

public  career,  "  De  mortuis  nil."  "  Don't  you  wish 
to  finish  that  quotation,  'nisi  bonum,'"  asked  the 
reporter  who  was  seeking  a  statement.  * '  No, ' '  said 
the  Senator  sharply;  "De  mortuis  nil."  Of  the 
ambassador  to  France  nil,  except  that  he  comes 
from  Ohio. 

But  when  we,  given  all  these  causes  for  the  weak- 
ness of  Congress,  the  frail  hold  which  the  idea  of 
self-government  has  upon  the  popular  mind,  the 
unimportance  of  the  taxing  power,  the  tendency  to 
concentrate  on  the  executive  at  the  expense  of  the 
legislative,  the  obstacles  to  ability  which  medioc- 
rity has  erected  in  Congress,  we  have  not  explained 
the  present  extraordinary  confusion  and  demoral- 
ization in  the  legislative  branch.  Most  of  these 
causes  have  been  operating  for  some  time,  yet 
Congress  has  been  able  to  function.  Only  since 
Mr.  Harding  became  President  has  the  breakdown 
of  Congress  been  marked. 

If  you  ask  observers  in  Washington  why  the  last 
Congress  failed  more  completely  than  any  of  its 
predecessors,  with  one  voice  they  reply:  "Lack  of 
leadership."  Everybody  cackles  of  leadership  as  if 
lack  of  leadership  were  a  cause  and  not  a  symptom. 
What  is  it  that  makes  a  leader  and  followers  unless 
it  is  a  common  purpose? 

The  weakness  of  Mr.  Harding,  Mr.  Lodge, 
Speaker  Gillett,  Mr.  Mondell  lies  partly  in  them- 
selves, but  it  is  made  more  apparent  by  the  difficul- 
ties that  confront  them.  It  traces  back  to  the 

166 


REPRESENTATIVE    FREDERICK   H.    GILLETT  OF   MASSACHUSETTS 


SOMETHING  TO  DO— NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

uncertainties  in  the  national  mind.  Who  could 
lead  representatives  of  taxpayers  staggering  under 
the  costs  of  the  war  and  representatives  of  soldiers 
striving  to  lay  an  added  burden  on  the  taxpayers? 
Who  could  lead  representatives  of  farmers  who 
demand  that  a  large  share  of  the  credit  available 
in  this  country  be  mobilized  by  the  government 
for  the  subvention  of  agriculture  and  representa- 
tives of  commerce  and  manufacture  who  wish  to 
keep  the  government  from  competing  with  them 
for  the  stock  of  credit?  Or  labor  which  insists  that 
the  way  to  improve  business  is  by  stimulating  de- 
mand at  home  through  liberal  wages,  increasing 
consumption;  and  the  other  classes  which  insist 
that  the  way  to  restore  business  is  by  making  in- 
creased consumption  possible  to  them  through 
lower  prices  only  to  be  accomplished  through  lower 
wages?  The  conflict  runs  across  party  lines.  The 
old  rallying  cries  fall  on  deaf  ears. 

The  Republican  party  was  based  on  the  common 
belief  that  government  favors  delivered  at  the  top 
percolated  down,  by  a  kind  of  gravity  that  oper- 
ated with  rough  justice,  to  all  levels  of  society, 
like  water  from  a  reservoir  on  a  hill  reaching  all 
the  homes  of  a  city.  When  you  called  for  loyalty 
to  that  you  called  for  loyalty  to  everybody's 
stomach,  expressed  in  the  half -forgotten  phrase: 
"  The  full  dinner  pail." 

Now,  the  various  elements  of  society  are  doubt- 
ful of  what  may  reach  them  by  the  force  of  gravity 

167 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

from  the  top.  Each  insists  that  government  favor 
shall  enter  at  its  level  and  be  diffused  from  that 
center.  Would  you  make  the  nation  happy  and 
rich,  give  the  soldiers  a  five-billion-dollar  bonus  and 
start  them  buying?  Give  the  farmers  a  several- 
billion-dollar  guarantee  of  their  staples  and  start 
prosperity  on  the  farm.  Give  labor  high  wages  and 
start  prosperity  there  by  stimulating  consumption. 
Give  the  consumer  lower  prices  by  cutting  wages 
and  start  prosperity  there.  Shift  the  burden  of 
taxation  somewhat  from  wealth  and  start  prosperity 
once  more  in  the  good  old  way  by  favors  at  the  top. 

One  might  compare  the  breakup  that  has  oc- 
curred in  this  country  to  the  breakup  that  took 
place  in  Russia  after  the  first  revolution,  the  peace- 
ful and  ineffective  revolution  of  1905.  All  parties 
in  Russia  united  against  absolutism.  A  measure  of 
representative  government  being  established  and 
the  main  object  of  the  revolution  being  achieved, 
all  parties  fell  to  quarrelling  among  themselves  as 
to  which  should  profit  most  by  the  new  institutions. 

Under  Mr.  Roosevelt  and  his  successors  a 
mild  revolution  was  accomplished.  People  turned 
against  economic  absolutism.  They  had  begun  to 
question  the  unregulated  descent  of  favors  from 
the  top.  They  doubted  the  force  of  gravity  that 
used  to  fill  dinner  pails.  They  demanded  some 
representation  in  the  process  of  filling  dinner  pails. 
They  set  up  a  government  at  Washington  to  con- 
trol credit  and  transportation. 

168 


SOMETHING  TO  DO— NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

And  now  they  have  fallen  apart  over  who  shall 
pay  the  taxes,  who  shall  have  use  of  the  credit,  who 
shall  profit  by  lowered  freight  rates,  rebates  in 
principle,  special  favors  in  transportation,  under  a 
new  name. 

When  men  today  deplore  the  lack  of  leadership 
they  are  comparing  Mr.  Harding  with  Mr.  Roose- 
velt and  Mr.  Wilson,  and  Mr.  Lodge  and  Mr. 
Mondell  with  Senator  Hanna  and  Senator  Aldrich. 
Today's  chiefs  of  state  are  of  smaller  stature.  Mr. 
Harding  has  been  a  drifter  all  his  life;  he  has  not 
the  native  force  of  Mr.  Roosevelt,  the  sheer  vital- 
ity which  gloried  in  overcoming  obstacles.  He  has 
not  the  will  of  Mr.  Wilson.  The  petulant  Lodge  is 
not  the  same  order  of  being  as  the  brutal,  thick- 
necked  Hanna,  or  the  more  finished  but  still  robust 
Aldrich. 

But  beyond  this  personal  superiority  which  the 
leaders  of  the  past  had,  they  enjoyed  the  advantage 
of  standing  upon  sure  ground.  Mr.  Hanna  be- 
longed to  that  fortunate  generation  which  never 
doubted,  whether  it  was  in  religion  or  morals  or 
politics.  He  may  not  have  put  it  so  to  himself, 
but  behind  everything  that  he  did  lay  the  tacit 
assumption  that  the  business  system  was  divinely 
ordained.  The  hand  of  Providence  was  conspicu- 
ous everywhere  in  America's  rise,  but  nowhere 
more  than  in  the  rapid  turning,  unprecedented  in 
the  world's  history,  of  minerals  and  fprests  into  a 
civilization. 

169 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

In  times  of  daily  miracles  it  is  easy  to  believe. 
Mr.  Hanna  believed,  the  public  believed,  Congress 
believed.  Mr.  Hanna  spoke  for  this  divinely 
ordained  system  which  was  developing  an  unde- 
veloped continent  as  one  had  never  been  in  the 
memory  of  man,  making  us  all  richer,  with  a  cer- 
tain rough  justice,  according  to  our  deserts. 

He  himself  was  a  pioneer.  He  himself  had 
created  wealth.  He  knew  the  creators  of  wealth. 
He  delivered  the  commandments  handed  down  to 
him  on  the  mountain.  With  God  so  much  on  his 
side  a  much  lesser  man  than  Hanna  would  have 
been  a  great  leader.  God  isn't  on  the  side  of  Mr. 
Lodge.  That  is  the  difference. 

Mr.  Aldrich  represented  a  less  pure  faith.  What 
had  been  a  primitive  religion  had  become  an  es- 
tablished church.  He  had  behind  him  a  power  of 
organization  in  business  and  Congress  that  Hanna 
had  not.  The  public  may  have  been  less  faithful ; 
still  the  religion  he  represented  was  the  official 
religion. 

Like  Hanna,  he  was  rich  and  a  creator  of  wealth ; 
in  addition  he  was  connected  by  marriage  with  the 
richest  family  in  the  United  States.  He  was  the 
spokesman  of  business,  and  even  if  faith  was 
decaying  no  one  seriously  questioned  the  sacred 
character  of  business  as  the  instrument  of  Provi- 
dence for  making  America  great,  rich,  and  free. 

The  chief  aim  was  the  creation  of  wealth.  No 
one  could  doubt  that  the  business  organization 

170 


SOMETHING  TO  DO— NO  ONE  TO  DO  IT 

was  accomplishing  it  with  unparalleled  success. 
Perhaps  the  heads  of  the  business  organization  kept 
a  little  too  much  of  the  newly  created  wealth  to 
themselves,  but  at  least  everyone  shared  in  it  and 
it  was  wise  to  let  well  enough  alone.  Where  there 
is  such  substantial  unity  as  existed  at  that  time,  no 
great  personal  qualities  are  required  for  leadership. 

And  Mr.  Aldrich  was  not  endowed  with  great 
personal  qualities.  He  has  been  gone  from  Wash- 
ington only  a  dozen  years,  and  yet  no  tradition  of 
him  survives  except  that  he  managed  the  Senate 
machine  efficiently.  In  type  he  was  the  business 
executive.  He  represented  more  fully  than  anyone 
else  in  the  Senate  the  one  great  interest  of  the 
country.  He  stood  for  a  reality,  and  it  gave  him 
tremendous  power. 

His  mind  was  one  of  ordinary  range.  He  traded 
in  tariff  schedules  and  erected  majorities  upon  the 
dispensing  of  favors.  He  bestowed  public  buildings 
and  river  improvements  in  return  for  votes.  Lead- 
ers have  not  now  these  things  to  give  or  have  them 
in  insufficient  quantities  and  on  too  unimportant 
a  scale. 

No  great  piece  of  constructive  legislation  serves 
to  recall  him.  Primarily  a  man  of  business,  he 
nevertheless  attached  his  name  to  the  grotesque 
Aldrich-Vreeland  currency  act.  The  work  of  the 
monetary  commission  of  which  he  was  the  head, 
and  which  led  to  the  present  Federal  Reserve  Law, 
was  the  work  of  college  professors  and  economists. 

171 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Natually  a  better  leader  than  Mr.  Lodge  be- 
cause he  met  men  more  easily  upon  a  common 
ground  and  had  more  vitality  than  the  Massa- 
chusetts Senator  has,  he  was  no  better  leader  than 
any  one  of  half  a  dozen  present  Senators  would  be 
if  the  aim  of  business  were  accepted  today  by 
the  country  as  the  great  social  aim,  as  it  was  in  his 
day,  and  if  any  one  of  the  six  now  spoke  for  business 
in  the  Senate  as  in  his  time  he  did. 

Give  Mr.  Brandegee  or  Mr.  Lenroot  or  Mr. 
Wadsworth  a  people  accepting  that  distribution 
which  worked  out  from  extending  to  the  heads  of 
the  business  organization  every  possible  favor  and 
immunity,  as  the  distribution  best  serving  the 
interests  of  all,  and  add  unto  him  plenty  of  public 
buildings  and  river  improvements,  and  he  could 
lead  as  well  as  Mr.  Aldrich. 


172 


CHAPTER  X 

INTERLUDE.      INTRODUCING  A  FEW  MEMBERS  OF  THE 
UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE  AND  SOME  OTHERS 

THERE  is  a  saying  that  in  American  families 
there  is  only  three  or  four  generations  from  riches 
to  shirt  sleeves.  Mr.  Hanna  is  the  first  generation, 
Mr.  Aldrich  is  the  second  generation.  In  Mr. 
Penrose  and  Mr.  Lodge  you  reach  what  is  a  com- 
mon phase  of  American  family  history,  the  ec- 
centric generation.  And  in  Senator  Jim  Watson 
and  Senator  Charles  Curtis,  who  are  just  coming 
on  the  scene  as  "leaders/*  you  reach  once  more 
political  shirt  sleeves. 

The  American  family  dissipating  its  patrimony, 
produces  invariably  the  son  who  is  half  contemptu- 
ous of  the  old  house  that  founded  his  fortunes,  who 
is  half  highbrow,  who  perhaps  writes  books  as  well 
as  keeping  them,  or  it  may  be  bolts  to  the  other 
side  altogether. 

So  the  Hanna-Aldrich  stock  produced  Henry 
Cabot  Lodge,  a  sort  of  political  James  Hazen  Hyde, 
who  stayed  at  home  and  satisfied  his  longing  for 
abroad  by  serving  on  the  Senate  Foreign  Relations 

173 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Committee.  But  perhaps  it  would  be  fairer  to  Mr. 
Lodge  to  say  of  him  what  a  witty  friend  of  mine 
did,  "Lodge  is  what  Henry  James  would  have  been 
if  Henry  James  had  remained  in  America  and  gone 
into  politics."  Or  he  is  what  Henry  Adams  might 
have  been  if  Henry  Adams  had  been  less  honest  in 
his  contempt  for  democracy. 

The  last  leaf  of  that  New  England  tree  whose 
fruit  was  an  expatriate  literature  and  expatriate 
lives,  the  limit  of  Mr.  Lodge's  expatriation  was 
an  interest  in  foreign  affairs  when  redder-blooded 
Americans  were  happily  ignorant  of  them.  If 
business  had  been  choosing  spokesmen  at  Washing- 
ton it  would  no  more  have  picked  out  Mr.  Lodge 
than  it  would  have  picked  out  James  Hazen  Hyde 
or  Henry  James.  Mr.  Lodge's  leadership  was  a 
sign  of  decay. 

But  some  will  say  business  at  this  time  had 
Senator  Penrose  as  its  spokesman.  I  doubt  it. 
Senator  Penrose  was  that  other  son  of  the  family  in 
whose  blood  runs  all  the  ancestral  energies  without 
the  ancestral  restraint. 

By  the  time  he  achieved  prominence  business  in 
politics  was  no  longer  quite  respectable.  People 
said,  creating  the  Penrose  legend,  "Why,  Penrose 
would  stop  at  nothing.  He'd  even  represent  the 
selfish  interests  here  in  Washington. "  Therefore 
it  was  considered  that  he  must  represent  them. 
And  he  did  to  an  extent,  speaking  for  Henry  C. 
Frick  and  some  others  of  Pennsylvania,  but  he  was 

174 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

in  no  adequate  sense  the  successor  of  Aldrich  and 
Hanna. 

Had  business  chosen  a  spokesman  at  Washington, 
he  must  have  been  respectable.  Hanna  was  that 
most  respectable  of  Americans,  the  highly  success- 
ful man  who  has  played  for  and  won  a  great  for- 
tune. Aldrich  was  that  equally  respectable  Ameri- 
can, the  conservative  manager  of  the  established 
corporation. 

There  is  a  story  that  when  Penrose  became  boss 
of  Pennsylvania  the  Republican  politicians  of  the 
State  were  anxious  about  the  effect  his  personal 
reputation  would  have  upon  the  voters.  Finally 
they  went  to  him,  as  the  elders  sometimes  go 
to  the  young  parson,  and  said,  "The  organization 
thinks  the  people  would  like  it  better  if  you  were 
married."  "All  right,  boys,  if  you  think  so," 
Penrose  replied;  "let  the  organization  pick  the 
gal . ' '  The  organization  recoiled  from  this  cynicism. 
But  business  is  harder.  Business,  if  it  had  really 
identified  itself  with  Penrose,  would  have  "picked 
the  gal." 

No  better  evidence  of  the  tenuity  of  his  con- 
nection with  business  is  required  than  his  outbreak 
in  1920,  "I  won't  have  the  international  bankers 
write  the  platform  and  nominate  the  candidate  at 
Chicago." 

Mr.  Penrose  enjoyed  a ' '  succes  de  scandale. ' '  He 
was  what  the  hypocrites  in  Washington  secretly 
desired  to  be  but  lacked  the  courage  to  be.  He 

i75 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

lived  up  to  the  aristocratic  tradition,  at  its  worst ; 
which  everyone  admires,  especially  at  its  worst. 
He  did  on  a  grand  scale  what  anyone  else  would 
have  been  damned  for  doing  on  a  lesser  scale  and 
was  loved  for  being  so  splendidly  shocking. 

He  was  the  village  sport,  with  the  best  blood 
of  the  village  in  his  veins,  and  was  the  village 
delight,  the  man  about  whom  all  the  best  stories 
were  whispered.  He  had  the  clear  mind  which 
comes  from  scorn  of  pretense.  But  all  this  is 
not  greatness,  nor  is  it  leadership.  The  Repub- 
licans in  the  Senate  before  being  led  by  Mr.  Pen- 
rose  would  have  insisted  on  "picking  the  gal." 
They  like  to  see  framed  marriage  certificates  in 
the  party  household. 

The  patrimony  is  gone  and  we  reach  shirt  sleeves 
in  Senator  Charles  Curtis  and  Senator  James 
Watson,  one  of  whom  will  succeed  Mr.  Lodge  when 
he  dies,  retires,  or  is  retired,  and  the  other  of  whom 
will  succeed  Mr.  Cummins  as  president  pro  tern 
when  he  similarly  disposes  of  himself  or  is  disposed 
of. 

Neither  of  them  has  tne  stature  or  solidity  of 
Hanna  or  Aldrich,  and  they  will  not  have  support- 
ing them  unity  in  party  or  in  national  sentiment. 
Neither  of  them  has  the  romantic  quality  of  Mr. 
Penrose  or  Mr.  Lodge.  Neither  of  them  will 
ever  be  a  leader  in  any  real  sense  of  the  word. 
Neither  of  them  will  have  anything  to  lead. 

As  frequently  happens  when  you  reach  shirt 

176 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

sleeves  by  the  downward  route,  you  find  the 
accumulative  instinct  reasserting  itself  on  a  petty 
scale.  Look  at  the  rather  shabby  clothes  that 
Senator  Curtis  wears,  in  spite  of  his  considerable 
wealth,  and  you  are  sure  that  you  have  to  do  with  a 
hoarder.  And  that  is  what  he  is;  a  hoarder  of 
political  minutiae. 

Current  report  is  that  he  is  the  best  poker  player 
in  either  house  of  Congress.  You  can  imagine 
him  sitting  across  the  table  watching  the  faces  of 
his  antagonists  with  a  cold  eye,  which  no  tremor 
of  a  muscle,  no  faint  coming  or  going  of  color,  no 
betraying  weakness  escapes. 

That  is  his  forte  in  politics,  knowing  all  the  little 
things  about  men  which  reveal  their  purposes  or 
operate  in  unexpected  ways  as  hidden  motives. 

He  has  a  perfect  card  catalogue  of  nearly  all  the 
voters  of  Kansas.  It  is  kept  up  to  date.  It  reports 
not  merely  names  and  addresses  but  personal 
details,  the  voter's  point  of  view,  what  interests 
him,  what  influences  may  be  brought  to  bear  on 
him.  Curtis  is  a  hoarder,  with  an  amazing  capa- 
city for  heaping  up  that  sort  of  information. 

His  mind  is  a  card  catalogue  of  the  Senate, 
vastly  more  detailed  than  the  card  catalogue  of 
Kansas.  He  watches  the  Senate  as  he  watches  the 
faces  of  his  antagonist  in  a  poker  game.  He  knows 
the  little  unconsidered  trifles  which  make  men  vote 
this  way  and  that.  And  he  is  so  objective  about 
it  all  that  he  rarely  deceives  himself.  If  into  this 

177 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

concern  with  the  small  motives  which  move  men 
there  crept  a  certain  contempt  of  humanity  he 
might  mislead  himself;  he  might  be  hateful,  too; 
but  his  objectivity  saves  him ;  he  is  as  objective  as  a 
card  catalogue  and  no  more  hateful. 

But  you  see  how  far  short  all  this  falls  from 
leadership,  or  statesmanship,  or  greatness  of  any 
description.  Usefulness  is  there  certainly;  card 
catalogues  are  above  all  useful,  especially  when 
there  is  variety  and  diversity  to  deal  with,  as 
there  is  coming  to  be  in  a  Senate  ruled  by  blocs  and 
frequented  by  undisciplined  individualism. 

If  Curtis  kept  a  journal  ne  would  hand  down  to 
posterity  a  most  perfect  picture  of  men  and  motives 
in  Washington, — if,  again,  posterity  should  be  in- 
terested in  the  fleeting  and  inconsiderable  figures 
who  fill  the  national  capital  "in  this  wicked  and 
adulterous  generation  seeking  for  a  sign" — I  am 
quoting  the  Bible  trained  Secretary  of  State  in  one 
of  his  petulant  moments. 

If  he  had  the  malice  of  Saint  Simon,  the  journal 
would  be  diverting,  but  he  is  without  malice.  He 
has  no  cynical  conception  of  men's  weakness  and 
smallness  as  something  to  play  upon.  He  accepts 
Senators  as  they  are,  sympathetically.  What 
makes  them  vote  this  way  and  that  is  the  major 
consideration  of  politics.  His  records  of  the 
Kansas  electorate  are  more  important  to  him  than 
principles,  policies,  or  morals.  The  efficient  elec- 
tion district  Captain  of  the  Senate,  that  is  Curtis. 

178 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

A  more  likely  successor  to  Lodge  is ' '  Jim' '  Watson 
of  Indiana.  I  attended  a  theatrical  performance 
in  Washington  recently.  Nearby  sat  the  Indiana 
Senator.  His  neighbor,  whom  I  did  not  recognize, 
doubtless  some  politician  from  Indiana,  sat  with 
his  arm  about  Watson's  neck,  before  the  curtain 
rose,  pouring  confidences  into  Watson's  ear. 

•Watson  is  given  to  public  embraces.  His  arm 
falls  naturally  about  an  interlocutor's  shoulders  or, 
and  this  is  important  as  showing  that  Jim  is  not 
merely  patronizing,  descending  affectionately  from 
the  great  heights  of  the  Senatorship,  Jim  himself,  as 
at  the  theatre,  is  the  object  of  the  embrace.  But 
perhaps  that  is  finer  condescension. 

If  the  characteristic  gesture  of  Lodge  is  the 
imperious  clapping  of  his  hands  for  the  Senate 
pages  and  the  revealing  trait  of  Curtis  is  extra- 
ordinary intuition  about  the  cards  in  other  hands 
around  the  lamp-lit  table,  the  soul  of  Watson  is  in 
the  embrace.  His  voice  is  a  caress.  He  kisses 
things  through.  He  never  errs  in  personal  re- 
lations, if  you  like  to  be  embraced — and  most  men 
do,  by  greatness. 

In  one  of  his  less  successful  moments  he  rep- 
resented, at  Washington  the  National  Manu- 
facturers' Association,  at  that  time  a  rather  shady 
organization  of  lesser  business  men.  If  he  had  not 
been  the  orator  that  he  is  he  would  have  been  with 
that  circumambulatory  arm  of  his,  an  inevitable 
lobbyist. 

179 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

For  Watson  is  an  orator,  of  the  old  school,  the 
Harding  school.  They  employ  the  same  loose  style 
of  speech,  flabby  as  unused  muscles,  words  that 
come  into  your  head  because  you  have  often  heard 
them  on  the  stump  and  in  the  Senate,  and  read 
them  in  country  editorials,  words  that  have  long 
lost  their  precise  meaning  but  evoke  the  old  pictures 
in  the  minds  of  an  emotional  and  unthinking 
electorate.  At  this  art  of  emitting  a  long  rumble 
of  speech  which  is  not  addressed  to  the  mind 
Watson  has  no  equal. 

It  is  an  American  art  and  puzzling  to  foreigners. 
Vice-Admiral  Kato,  not  the  head  of  the  Japanese 
delegation  but  the  second  Kato,  had  enough  English 
to  remark  it.  "Your  President,"  he  said,  "is  a 
charming  man,  but  why  does  he  put  such  funny 
things  in  his  speeches?" 

In  the  mere  mastery  of  this  kind  of  English  Mr. 
Harding  may  equal  Watson,  but  as  an  orator  the 
Indianian  has  what  the  President  never  had;  the 
unctious  quality  in  him  which  makes  him  embrace 
readily  lets  him  pour  out  his  soul  freely.  He  has 
thunders  in  his  voice,  he  tosses  his  head  with  its 
fuzzy  hair  magnificently,  he  has  gusto.  He  has 
imagination.  He  is  a  big,  lovable  if  not  wholly 
admirable,  boy  playing  at  oratory,  playing  at 
statesmanship,  playing  above  all  at  politics.  Noth- 
ing is  very  real  to  him,  not  even  money;  he  put 
all  he  had  into  an  irrigation  project  and  left  it 
there.  Just  now  he  irrigates  with  the  tears  in  his 

180 


SENATOR   JOSEPH    S.    FRELINGHUYSEN    OF    NEW  JERSEY 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

voice  the  arid  places  in  the  Republican  party  where 
loyalty  should  grow. 

I  present  these  characterizations  of  Senate 
leaders,  past,  present,  and  future,  to  indicate 
through  them  what  the  Senate  itself  is,  and  to 
suggest  what  conditions  have  given  quite  ordinary 
men  power  and  how  feeble  leadership  has  become, 
with  the  country  no  longer  agreed  how  best  to 
promote  the  general  good,  and  with  Congress  as  it 
has  been  in  recent  years  a  relatively  unimportant 
factor  in  the  national  government. 

Senator  Platt  used  to  say  of  an  habitual  candi- 
date for  nomination  to  the  governorship  of  New 
York,  Timothy  L.  Woodruff,  "Well,  it  may  taper 
down  to  Tim/ '  We  have  ' '  tapered  down  to  Tim, ' ' 
— or  rather  to  "  Jim" — in  the  Senate  because  as  a 
people  we  have  been  indifferent  and  unsure,  and 
because  there  has  been  little  use  for  anything  but 
1 '  Tims  "  or  "  Jims ' '  in  Washington.  Nature  seems 
to  abhor  a  waste  in  government. 

Those  who  ascribe  all  the  troubles  in  Congress  to 
lack  of  leadership,  and  go  no  further,  blame  the 
poverty  of  our  legislative  life  upon  the  popular 
election  of  Senators  and  upon  the  choice  of  candi- 
dates at  direct  primaries.  But  the  decay  began 
before  the  system  changed.  We  resorted  to  new 
methods  of  nomination  and  election  because  the  old 
methods  were  giving  us  Lorimers  and  Addickses. 
Probably  we  gained  nothing,  but  we  lost  little. 

Big  business,  so  long  as  the  taxing  power, 

181 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

through  the  imposition  of  the  tariff,  was  important 
to  it,  and  so  long  as  it  was  accepted  as  the  one  vital 
interest  of  the  country,  saw  to  it  that  it  was 
effectively  represented  in  Congress.  It  was  then 
somebody's  job  to  see  that  at  least  some  solid  men 
went  to  Washington.  It  has  of  late  been  nobody's 
job.  There  has  been  no  real  competition  for  seats 
in  the  national  legislature. 

The  Senate  has  tempted  small  business  men  who 
can  not  arise  to  the  level  of  national  attention 
through  their  control  of  industry,  and  small  lawyers 
similarly  restricted  in  their  efforts  for  publicity. 
It  is  an  easily  attained  national  stage. 

It  appeals  to  that  snobbish  instinct — of  wives 
sometimes — which  seeks  social  preferment  not  to 
be  obtained  in  small  home  towns,  or  denied  where 
family  histories  are  too  well  known. 

It  allures  the  politician,  bringing  opportunity  to 
play  the  favorite  game  of  dispensing  patronage  and 
delivering  votes,  with  the  added  pomp  of  a  title. 

It  is  the  escape  of  the  aristocrat,  whose  traditions 
leave  him  the  choice  between  idleness  and  what  is 
called  "public  service." 

It  is  the  escape  of  the  successful  man  who  has 
found  his  success  empty  and  tries  to  satisfy  the 
unsatisfied  cravings  of  his  nature.  Such  men 
"retire"  into  it,  as  it  was  reported  to  President 
Harding's  indignation  that  one  of  the  Chicago 
banker  candidates  for  the  Secretaryship  of  the 
Treasury  wished  to  retire  into  the  Cabinet.  Some 

182 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

enter  it  for  one  of  these  motives,  more  from  a 
combination  of  them,  but,  generally,  it  is  the 
promised  land  of  the  bored,  some  of  whom  find  it 
only  a  mirage. 

A  typical  Senator  is  Mr.  Frelinghuysen  of  New 
Jersey,  one  of  the  smaller  business  men  being  drawn 
into  public  life.  Son  of  a  country  minister,  he 
started  as  an  insurance  agent.  Nature  equipped 
him  with  unusual  energy  and  aggressiveness  and 
those  two  qualities  brought  success  in  writing  insur- 
ance. Nothing  in  his  early  training  inhibited  his 
robust  temperament.  Ruddy  and  vigorous,  he  is 
not  sicklied  o'er  with  any  pale  cast  whatever. 
Plainly  he  has  a  zest  for  life,  that  easily  accessible 
American  life  where  good  mixers  abound. 

Not  a  highbrow,  he  yet  recognizes  that  literature 
has  its  place,  on  all  four  walls  of  a  large  room,  and 
bought  in  sets. 

Having  the  American  horror  of  loneliness, 
whether  social  or  moral,  you  find  him  always  going 
along  with  his  party.  When  his  set  divides  he 
balances  between  the  two  factions  as  long  as 
possible  and  elects  to  go  with  the  more  numerous. 
Simple,  likable,  honest,  safe  so  long  as  majorities 
are  safe,  and  that  is  the  theory  we  are  working  on, 
he  is  the  average  man  in  everything  but  his 
aggressiveness  and  energy. 

No,  he  also  rises  above  the  average  in  possessing 
such  a  name  as  Frelinghuysen.  You  enter  his 
library  and  you  see  a  banner  of  the  campaign  of 

183 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Clay  and  Frelinghuysen.  He  will  recite  to  you 
campaign  songs  of  those  unsuccessful  candidates 
for  President  and  Vice-President.  Another 
Frelinghuysen  was  a  Cabinet  member.  Another 
Frelinghuysen,  of  the  wealthier  branch  of  the 
family,  has  an  assured  social  position. 

None  of  these  famous  Frelinghuysens  is  an 
ancestor.  Each  of  them  is  a  challenge.  If  he 
could  have  found  an  ancestor!  If  an  insurance 
company  were  a  high  place  from  which  to  survey 
the  world  at  one's  feet!  But,  no!  Ancestors, 
power,  publicity,  social  prestige,  all  lie  beyond 
the  reach  of  small  business  success. 

In  the  Senate  men,  important  men,  come  to  you 
for  favors ;  it  is  so  much  better  than  going  to  them 
to  write  policies.  From  the  Senatorship  you 
condescend;  there  really  is  a  world  to  which  a 
Senator  can  condescend.  Washington  is  a  social 
melting  pot.  No  one  asks  whether  you  are  one  of 
the  Blanks.  You  are  Senator  Blank  and  that  is 
enough.  And  if  you  are  so  fortunate,  by  your  very 
averageness,  to  attach  yourself  to  the  average 
man  whose  fortune  makes  him  President,  and  you 
become  one  of  the  Harding  Senators,  one  of  the 
intimates,  you  are  lifted  up:  like  Bottom,  you  are 
translated.  You  are  the  familiar  of  greatness. 

As  a  legislator  you  deal  with  policies,  inter- 
national and  domestic,  in  the  realm  of  ideas — as 
when  you  sit  in  your  library,  four  square  with  all 
the  wisdom  of  the  ages. 

184 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISffi 

If  you  have  enough  of  the  boy  about  you,  like 
Frelinghuysen,  you  enjoy  all  this  hugely.  You 
have  projected  your  ego  beyond  the  limits  of  the 
insurance  business.  You  look  among  the  branches 
of  the  Fielinghuysen  family  tree  without  losing 
countenance.  Who  knows  that  there  won't  be 
another  "and  Frelinghuysen"  ticket,  this  time  a 
successful  one? 

Not  every  senator  has  escaped  so  nearly  from 
the  failures  which  attend  success  as  has  Freling- 
huysen.  Nor  is  his  escape  complete.  A  sense  of 
unreality  haunts  him.  Aggressiveness  in  his  case 
covers  it,  as  it  so  often  does  a  feeling  of  weakness. 
After  he  has  blustered  through  some  utterance,  he 
will  buttonhole  you  and  ask,  "Did  I  make  a  damn 
fool  of  myself  ?  Now,  the  point  I  was  trying  to 
make  was,  etc.  Did  I  get  it  dear?  Or  did  I  seem 
like  a  damn  fool?" 

Less  agile  minded  than  Senator  Edge,  he  watches 
the  motions  of  his  New  Jersey  colleague  as  a  fasci- 
nated bird  watches  those  of  a  snake  or  a  cat. 
Intellectually  he  is  not  at  ease,  even  in  the  Senate. 

Another  of  the  Harding  set  is  Harry  New  of 
Indiana,  one  of  the  "  Wa'al  naow  "  school  of  states- 
men, in  dress  and  speech  the  perfect  county  chair- 
man of  the  stage.  The  broad-brimmed  black  felt 
hat,  winter  and  summer,  has  withstood  all  the 
insidious  attacks  of  fashion.  The  nasal  voice  has 
equally  resisted  all  the  temptations  to  conformity 
with  the  softer  tones  which  are  now  everywhere 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

heard.  In  politics  one  has  to  be  regular,  and  New 
has  the  impulse  to  individuality,  which  with  Borah 
and  LaFollette  manifests  itself  in  political  isolation. 
With  New  it  manifests  itself  in  hat  and  speech. 
New  thus  remains  a  person,  not  merely  a  clothes- 
horse  which  is  recorded  "aye"  when  Mr.  Lodge 
votes  "aye"  and  "no"  when  Mr.  Lodge  votes 
"no."  But  this  is  hardly  fair.  Mr.  New  has 
been  irregular  in  other  ways.  He  has  not  made 
money;  he  has  lost  it,  a  fortune  in  a  stone  quarry. 
He  is  indifferent  to  it.  This  marks  him  as  a 
person.  He  would  rather  whip  a  stream  for  trout 
than  go  after  dollars  with  a  landing  net. 

Whipping  a  stream  for  trout  is  the  clue  to  Harry 
New.  If  you  are  a  fisherman  you  impute  all  sorts 
of  wiles  to  the  fish.  You  match  your  wits  against 
the  sharp  wits  under  the  water,  and  your  ego  is 
fortified  when,  the  day  being  dark  and  your  hand 
being  cunning,  you  land  a  mess  from  the  stream. 
The  world  is  a  trout  stream  to  New.  The  hat  and 
the  nasal  accent  are  the  good  old  flies  that  Isaak 
Walton  recommended. 

There  is  the  type  of  mind  which  sees  craft  where 
others  see  simplicity.  We  associate  shrewdness 
with  the  kind  of  hat  New  wears  and  the  kind  of 
voice  he  has  preserved  against  the  seductions  of 
politeness.  It  is  one  of  our  rural  traditions. 
Suppose  shrewdness  that  asks  no  more  than 
conversation  and  a  small  mess  of  fish.  It  is 
delightful.  As  we  listen  to  it  arriving  after  the 

186 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

most  penetrating  exposition  at  the  same  con- 
clusions which  we  have  reached  directly  and 
stupidly,  we  are  flattered.  We  realize  that  we, 
too,  are  shrewd,  unconsciously  so,  as,  wasn't  it 
Moliere's  bourgeois  gentleman,  who  learned  that  he 
was  unconsciously  a  gentleman,  since  he  had  been 
doing  all  his  life  some  of  the  things  that  gentlemen 
did? 

A  playboy  of  the  western  plains,  New  would  be 
happier  if  his  colleague,  Jim  Watson,  did  not  also 
take  himself  seriously  as  a  politician.  *'  Jim,"  says 
New,  "is  an  orator,  a  great  orator,  but  he  ought  to 
let  politics  alone ;  as  a  politician  he  is,  like  all  orators 
a  child." 

New  is  no  orator.  A  fair  division  would  be  for 
Watson  to  be  the  orator  and  New  the  politician. 
But  no  one  is  ready  to  admit  that  he  is  no  politician. 
For  New  politics  is  craft ;  for  Watson  it  is  embraces. 
At  a  dinner  in  Indiana,  New  contrived  to  have  his 
rival  for  the  senatorship,  Beveridge,  and  the 
politically  outlawed  Mayor  of  Indianapolis,  Lew 
Shank,  not  invited.  Watson  would  have  led  them 
both  in  with  an  arm  around  the  neck  of  each. 
That  individualism  which  makes  New  preserve  the 
hat  and  the  accent  makes  him  punish  foes,  or  is  it 
that  the  sense  of  being  "close  to  Harding"  robs 
him  of  discretion? 

In  the  board  of  aldermen  of  any  large  city  you 
will  find  a  dozen  Calders,  local  builders  or  con- 
tractors, good  fellows  who  have  the  gift  of  knowing 

187 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

everyone  in  their  districts,  who  by  doing  little 
favors  here  and  there  get  themselves  elected  to  the 
municipal  legislature;  they  see  that  every  con- 
stituent gets  his  street  sign  and  sidewalk 
encumbrance  permits,  interview  the  police  in 
their  behalf  when  necessary,  and  the  bright  young 
men  who  compose  the  traditional  humor  of  the  daily 
press  refer  to  them  gaily  as  "statesmen." 

The  art  of  being  a  Senator  like  Calder  is  the  art 
of  never  saying  "no."  He  is  worth  mentioning 
because  he  has  the  bare  essentials  of  senatorship, 
the  habit  of  answering  all  letters  that  come  to  him, 
the  practice  of  introducing  by  request  all  bills  that 
anyone  asks  to  have  introduced,  industry  in  seeking 
all  jobs  and  favors  that  anyone  comes  to  him 
desiring. 

He  "goes  to  the  mat"  for  everybody  and  every- 
thing. He  shakes  everybody's  hand.  He  is  a 
good  news  source  to  representatives  of  the  local 
press  and  is  paid  for  his  services  in  publicity.  New 
York  is  populous  and  sent  many  soldiers  to  the  late 
war.  Nevertheless,  the  mother  or  father  of  a 
soldier  from  that  state  who  did  not  receive  a 
personal  letter  from  Calder  must  have  eluded 
the  post  office. 

He  votes  enthusiastically  for  everything  that 
everybody  is  for.  He  is  unhappy  when  he  has  to 
take  sides  on  sharply  debated  issues.  Morality  is 
a  question  of  majorities.  He  finds  safety  in 
numbers. 

188 


SENATOR    HARRY    S.    NEW   OF   INDIANA 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

Nature  was  not  kind  to  Calder;  it  left  him  with 
no  power  to  throw  a  bluff.  He  is  plainly  what  he 
is.  He  has  neither  words  nor  manner.  His  col- 
leagues look  down  on  him  a  little.  But  most  of 
them  are  after  all  only  Calder  plus,  and  plus, 
generally  speaking,  not  so  very  much.  He  is  the 
Senator  reduced  to  the  lowest  terms. 

Calder  is  timid,  more  timid  than  Frelinghuysen 
with  his  eternal  buttonholing  you  to  ask  what 
impression  he  has  made,  more  timid  than  anyone 
except  Kellogg  of  Minnesota.  The  latter  is  in  a 
constant  state  of  flutter.  Little  and  wisplike 
physically  he  seems  to  blow  about  with  every 
breeze  of  politics.  He  is  so  unsure  that  his  nerves 
are  always  on  edge,  in  danger  of  breaking.  When 
he  was  balancing  political  consequences  over  nicely 
during  the  League  of  Nations  discussion,  Ex-Presi- 
dent Taft  said  to  him  impatiently:  "The  trouble 
with  you,  Frank,  is  that  you  have  no  guts." 
Kellogg  straightened  up  all  his  inches — physically 
he  is  a  white-haired  and  bent  Will  H.  Hays — and 
replied,  "  I  allow  no  man  to  say  that  to  me."  He 
fluttered  out,  and  Mr.  Taft  being  kind-hearted 
followed  him  to  apologize. 

If  you  could  analyze  the  uneasiness  of  Mr. 
Kellogg  you  would  understand  the  fear  which 
haunts  the  minds  of  all  Senators.  Mr.  Kellogg 
comes  to  Washington  after  an  enormously  successful 
career  at  the  bar.  He  is  rich.  He  is  respected. 
His  place  in  society  is  secure.  What  would  the 

189 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

loss  of  the  senatorship  mean  to  such  a  man?  He 
ought  to  have  all  the  confidence  which  is  supposed 
to  be  in  the  man  who  rises  in  the  world,  all  that 
which  comes  from  an  established  position.  Unlike 
most  great  lawyers  who  retire  into  the  Senate,  Mr. 
Kellogg  does  not  merely  interest  himself  in  con- 
stitutional questions,  like  a  child  with  molasses  on 
its  fingers  playing  with  feathers.  He  is  industrious. 
He  interests  himself  in  the  Senate's  business.  He 
develops  nice  scruples  which  can  not  be  brushed 
aside.  He  wears  himself  out  over  them.  Hehesi- 
tates.  He  trembles.  The  certainty  with  which 
his  mind  must  have  operated  in  the  field  of  legal 
principles  deserts  him  in  the  field  of  political 
expediency.  Or  perhaps  it  is  that  he  sees  both 
principles  and  expediency  and  can  not  choose 
between  the  two. 

Wadsworth  of  New  York  is  an  exception  to  the 
general  run  of  Senators.  He  belongs  by  birth  to 
tiiedasswhiA  is  traditionaMy  free  from  hypocrisy. 
He  is  not  boisterously  contemptuous  of  the  slavish- 
ness  of  Senators  as  Penrose  was.  He  is  quietly 
contemptuous.  His  voice  has  a  note  of  well-bred 
impatience  in  it.  He  has  not  Penrose's  pleasure  in 
mere  shocking,  but  he  has  the  aristocratic  hatred 
of  moral  ostentation.  The  kind  of  thing  that  is  not 
done  is  the  kind  of  thing  that  is  not  done.  You 
don't  do  it  and  make  no  parade  of  your  abstinence. 
Wadsworth  does  not  open  his  home  to  all  his  New 
York  colleagues  in  both  houses  just  because  it  is 

190 


SENATOR   JAMES   W.   WADS  WORTH   OF  NEW  YORK 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

politically  expedient.  His  house  is  his  own,  and 
so  is  his  conscience,  which  is  not  surrendered  at  the 
demands  of  woman  suffrage  or  of  the  dries.  He 
has  courage.  He  has  convictions.  He  is  lonely. 
To  be  otherwise  than  lonely  in  the  Senate  you 
must  be  a  Frelinghuysen,  an  Elkins,  a  Newberry, 
a  New,  a  Watson,  or  a  Hale.  He  will  never  be 
a  leader.  He  has  no  more  place  in  the  Senate  as 
it  is  than  Lord  Robert  Cecil,  a  much  larger 
man,  has  in  the  House  of  Commons  as  it  is. 
Both  belong  to  another  day  and  generation. 
Neither  is  sure  of  anything  but  himself  and  each 
counts  the  world  well  lost.  Both  represent  the 
aristocratic  tradition. 

Industry  makes  Reed  Smoot  one  of  the  most 
useful  of  the  Senators.  He  has  a  passion  for  details. 
He  reads  all  the  bills.  He  makes  himself  a  master 
of  the  Government's  appropriations  and  expendi- 
tures. He  exudes  figures  from  every  pore.  By 
temperament  Mr.  Smoot  is  unhappy,  and  he  finds 
cause  of  dark  foreboding  in  the  mounting  costs  of 
government.  His  voice  has  a  scolding  note.  His 
manner  and  appearance  is  that  of  a  village  elder. 
His  heart  is  sore  as  he  regards  the  political  world 
about  him,  its  wastefulness,  its  consumption  of 
white  paper,  on  leaves  to  print  and  on  reports 
which  no  one  reads.  He  is  the  aggrieved  parent. 
"My  children/'  he  seems  always  to  say,  "you  must 
mend  your  ways."  He  specializes  in  misplaced 
-commas.  Nothing  is  too  trivial  for  his  all  seeing 

191 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

eyes.  In  committee  he  talks  much,  twice  as  much 
as  anyone  else,  about  points  which  escape  the 
attention  of  all  his  colleagues.  Senators,  wishing 
to  get  through  no  matter  how,  regard  him  as  a  pest. 
Only  an  unimaginative  and  uncreative  mind  can 
occupy  itself  as  Smoot's  does.  He  is  a  building 
inspector  rather  than  a  builder.  With  his  fussi- 
ness,  his  minor  prophetic  voice,  his  holier-than-thou 
attitude  toward  waste,  he  can  never  be  a  leader  of 
the  Senate  to  which  the  idle  apprentice,  the  good 
fellow,  who  dines  out  much  in  the  Harding  Senato- 
rial set,  the  small  business  man  seeking  a  place 
in  society,  give  its  tone  and  character. 

One  can  not  present  a  complete  gallery  of  the 
Senate  in  the  space  of  a  single  chapter.  I  have 
chosen  a  few  characteristic  figures,  the  leaders  past, 
present,  and  to  come,  the  small  business  man  who 
seeks  social  preferment  or  the  destruction  of  a  title 
in  Washington,  such  as  Calder  and  Frelinghuysen, 
the  politician  who  likes  to  play  the  game  better  in 
the  Capitol  than  at  home,  like  New,  the  aristocrat 
who  escapes  from  the  boredom  of  doing  nothing 
into  the  boredom  of  a  democratic  chamber,  the 
gradgrind  legislator  of  whom  there  are  few  like 
Smoot,  the  half  party  man,  half  bloc  man  like 
Capper. 

All  of  these  men  belong  to  a  party  and  are  limited 
by  that  party's  weakness,  its  lack  of  principles, 
the  caution  which  it  has  to  use  in  avoiding  the 
alienation  of  its  loosely  held  supporters.  The 

192 


SENATOR   WILLIAM    M.    CALDER    OF    NEW   YORK 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

party  program  is  something  on  which  all  kinds 
of  people  can  stand.  Necessarily  the  party  men 
in  the  Senate  are  tied  down  to  a  cause  that  is 
largely  negative.  They  can  not  be  other  than 
feeble  and  ineffective  figures. 

The  weakness  of  parties  has  led  to  the  emergence 
of  a  few  outstanding  individual  Senators  who  must 
be  examined  to  see  whether  around  them  the  new 
Senate  which  will  come  with  the  shift  of  power  and 
responsibility  to  the  legislative  branch  can  be  built. 
The  most  brilliant  and  interesting  of  them  is 
Senator  Borah,  but  it  is  significant  that  the  farm 
bloc  looking  for  a  leader  did  not  turn  to  him,  but 
chose  rather  much  less  significant  and  effective 
men. 

Yet  the  Idaho  Senator  seems  the  natural  rallying 
point  for  any  movement  which  will  give  new  life 
and  force  to  the  Senate.  He  is  established.  He  is 
the  most  potent  single  individual  in  the  upper 
house.  So  far  as  there  is  any  opposition  to  Presi- 
dent Harding  and  his  friends,  Mr.  Borah  is  that 
opposition.  His  is  the  intelligence  which  inspires 
the  Democratic  party  when  it  consents  to  be  in- 
spired by  intelligence.  He  believes  that  the 
revolution  has  come,  not  one  of  street  fighting  and 
bomb  throwing  but  a  peaceful  change  which  has 
made  the  old  parties  meaningless,  destroyed  the  old 
authorities  and  set  men  free  for  the  new  grouping 
that  is  to  take  place.  Others  in  the  Senate  see  this 
and  are  frightened.  Borah  sees  it  and  is  glad. 

13  193 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

His  bonds  are  loosed  and  he  is  a  vastly  braver, 
sincerer  and  more  effective  Senator  than  ever 
before. 

It  is  absurd  to  use  the  word  radical  of  Borah, 
Johnson,  or  LaFollette,  for  none  of  them  is  truly 
radical;  but  if  one  must  do  so  for  the  lack  of  any 
better  term,  then  Borah  is  the  conservatives' 
radical.  The  angriest  reactionary  remains  calm 
when  his  name  is  mentioned,  perhaps  because 
Borah  never  gets  into  a  passion  himself  and  never 
addresses  himself  to  popular  prejudice.  He  is  not 
a  mob  orator.  He  is  impersonal  in  his  appeals. 
No  one  any  longer  suspects  him  of  an  ambition  to 
be  President.  He  seems,  like  a  hermit,  to  have 
divorced  himself  from  the  earthly  passions  of 
politics  and  to  have  become  pure  intellect  operating 
in  the  range  of  public  affairs.  He  is  almost  a  sage 
while  still  a  Senator. 

If  we  had  the  custom  of  electing  our  Ex-Presi- 
dents to  the  Senate,  you  can  imagine  one  of  them, 
beyond  the  average  of  intelligence,  freed  from 
ambition  through  having  filled  the  highest  office, 
occupying  a  place  like  that  of  Borah. 

Borah  perhaps  likes  it  too  well  ever  to  descend 
into  the  market  place  and  become  a  leader.  His 
is  an  enviable  lot,  for  he  is  the  most  nearly  free  man 
in  Washington;  why  should  he  exchange  the  im- 
munity he  possesses  for  a  small  group  of  followers? 
Besides  he  believes  in  the  power  of  oratory  rather 
than  in  the  power  of  organization.  He  said  to  me 

194 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

at  the  Republican  Convention  of  1916,  "I  could 
stampede  this  crowd  for  Roosevelt."  The  crowd 
was  thoroughly  organized  against  Roosevelt. 

Nature  made  him  an  orator,  one  of  the  greatest 
in  the  country.  And  he  has  come  to  be  satisfied 
with  the  gift  he  has.  The  unimportance  of  his 
state,  Idaho,  has  freed  him  from  any  illusions  about 
himself  with  respect  to  the  Presidency.  The  habit 
of  carrying  a  comb  in  his  vest  pocket  marks  him  as 
free  from  the  social  ambitions  which  number  taore 
victims  in  the  Senate  than  the  ambition  for  the 
presidency.  He  is  almost  a  disembodied  spirit 
politically,  of  the  revolution  [he  discerns  he  will  be 
a  spectator. 

Hiram  Johnson  is  a  declining  figure.  I  see  no 
reason  to  modify  the  conclusion  which  was  reached 
about  him  in  the  Mirrors  of  Washington,  that  he 
thought  more  of  men  than  of  principles  and  especi- 
ally of  one  man,  Johnson.  The  test  of  his  sincerity 
came  when  the  vote  was  reached  on  the  unseating 
of  Senator  Newberry  for  spending  too  much  money 
in  the  Michigan  primaries. 

Johnson's  great  issue  a  year  before  had  been 
sanctity  of  popular  nominations.  Yet  when  he 
had  an  opportunity  to  speak  and  act  against  a 
brazen  even  though  foolish  attempt  to  buy  a 
nomination,  he  was  rushing  wildly  across  the 
continent,  arriving  after  the  vote  had  been 
taken. 

On  reaching  Washington,  he  called  his  news- 

195 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

paper  friends  before  him  to  explain  the  difficulties 
and  delays  that  had  made  him  late.  When  he  had 
finished  a  nasal  voice  from  the  press  remarked, 
"Senator,  there  will  be  great  public  sympathy 
with  you  as  a  victim  of  the  railroads.  But  the 
people  will  only  know  how  great  their  loss  has  been 
if  you  will  tell  them  now  how  you  would  have  voted 
if  you  had  been  here/1  Johnson  adjourned  the 
meeting  hastily  without  a  reply. 

The  absence  from  the  roll  call  and  the  theatrical 
attempt  to  make  it  appear  accidental  were  typical. 
Johnson  had  won  the  Michigan  primaries  in  the 
national  campaign  of  1920.  The  delegates  were  in 
control  of  Newberry's  political  friends.  They  re- 
mained firm  for  Johnson  throughout  the  balloting. 
Johnson  avoided  voting  against  their  leader  al- 
though his  principles  required  that  he  should  lead 
the  fight  for  his  unseating. 

Johnson  has  always  over-emphasized  Johnson. 
At  the  Progressive  convention  in  1912  when 
Roosevelt  was  nominated  for  the  Presidency  and 
Johnson  for  the  Vice-Presidency,  it  was  proposed, 
since  both  were  in  attendance,  to  bring  both  on  the 
stage  and  introduce  them  to  the  delegates.  The 
natural  order  was  Roosevelt  first,  since  he  was  the 
nominee  for  President  and  since  he  was,  moreover, 
one  of  the  most  distinguished  figures  in  the  world, 
and  Johnson,  since  he  had  second  place,  second. 
But  Johnson  would  go  second  to  no  man.  Either 
he  must  show  himself  on  the  stage  first  or  not  at  all. 

196 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

Finally  it  was  compromised  by  presenting  them 
together  at  the  same  moment,  holding  hands  upon 
the  platform. 

Johnson  can  never  see  himself  in  proper  per- 
spective. At  the  Progressive  convention  he  was 
more  important  than  Roosevelt.  In  the  Newberry 
case  his  political  fortunes  were  more  important 
than  honest  primaries. 

Senator  Reed  of  Missouri  is  possessed  of  a  devil. 
He  is  a  satirist  turned  politician.  He  has  the 
saeva  indignatio  of  Swift.  American  life  with  its 
stupidity,  its  facile  optimism,  its  gullibility,  its 
easy  compromises,  its  hypocrisy,  fills  him  with  rage. 
His  face  is  shot  red  with  passion.  His  .voice  is 
angry.  He  is  a  defeated  idealist  left  in  this  barren 
generation  without  an  ideal.  He  might  have  been 
led  away  by  the  war  as  so  many  were,  as  Wilson 
was,  into  the  belief  that  out  of  its  sufferings  would 
come  a  purified  and  elevated  humanity.  But  Reed 
is  hard  to  lead  away.  Where  other  men  see  beauty 
and  hope  he  searches  furiously  for  sham.  Where 
other  men  say  cheerfully  half  a  loaf  is  better  than 
no  bread  he  puts  the  half  loaf  on  the  scales  and 
proves  that  it  is  short  weight. 

An  old  prosecuting  attorney,  he  believes  that 
guilt  is  everywhere.  He  is  always  out  for  a  con- 
viction. If  the  evidence  is  insufficient  he  uses  all 
the  arts,  disingenuous  presentations,  appeals  to 
piejudice,  not  because  he  is  indifferent  to  justice 
but  because  the  accused  ought  to  be  hanged  anyway, 

i97 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

and  he  is  not  going  to  let  lack  of  evidence  stand  in 
the  way  of  that  salutary  consummation. 

He  conducts  a  lifelong  and  passionate  fight 
against  the  American  practice  of  "getting  away 
with  it."  Shall  Hoover  get  away  with  it  as  a  great 
and  pure  man,  the  benefactor  of  the  race!  Not 
while  Jim,  Reed  has  breath  in  his  body !  Here  is  an 
American  idol,  tear  it  down,  exhibit  its  clay  feet! 
Shall  Wilson  "get  away  with  it,"  with  his  League 
of  Nations  and  his  sublimated  world  set  free  from 
all  the  baser  passions  of  the  past?  Not  while  any 
acid  remains  on  Jim  Reed's  tongue! 

Reed  is  sincere.  He  hates  sham.  He  neverthe- 
less himself  uses  sham  to  fight  sham.  He  is  the 
nearest  thing  to  a  great  satirist  this  country  has 
developed.  And  the  amazing  consideration  is 
that  in  a  nation  which  dislikes  satire  a  satirist 
should  be  elected  by  the  suffrage  of  his  fellows. 

Probably  it  is  only  in  politics  that  we  tolerate 
satire.  In  self-government  we  only  half  believe. 
We  are  divided  in  our  own  minds.  We  make  laws 
furiously  and  laugh  at  the  laws  we  make.  We 
pretend  that  the  little  men  of  politics  are  great  and 
then  privately  we  indicate  our  real  perception  of 
the  truth  by  telling  how  small  they  are.  Politics 
is  suspect  and  it  stamps  you  as  a  person  of  pene- 
tration to  show  that  you  are  aware  what  sham  and 
dishonesty  there  is  in  them.  It  is  almost  as  good 
an  evidence  of  a  superior  mind  as  to  say,  "Of 
course  I  don't  believe  what  I  read  in  the  news- 

198 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

papers."  Now  satire  is  enjoyed  by  superior  minds, 
and  it  is  only  with  regard  to  politics  that  we  as  a 
people  have  superior  minds,  politics  not  being  like 
business  the  pursuit  of  honest  everyday  folk. 

Jim  Reed  is  then  that  part  of  ourselves  which 
tells  us  that  self-government  is  a  good  deal  of  a 
sham,  in  the  hands  of  amusing  charlatans.  We 
tolerate  him  in  perhaps  the  only  place  where  we 
would  tolerate  a  satirist,  in  the  Senate.  And  in 
the  Senate  they  fear  him. 

He  was  attacking  the  Four  Power  Pact.  ' '  People 
say,"  he  declared,  "that  this  ends  the  Anglo- Japan- 
ese alliance.  I  do  not  find  it  in  the  pact.  I  do  not 
find  it  nominated  in  the  bond,"  he  shouted.  And 
the  friends  of  the  pact  sat  silent  afraid  of  Reed's 
power  as  a  debater,  until  Senator  Lenroot  having 
studied  the  document  several  minutes  in  the  cloak- 
room read  the  plain  language  of  the  agreement  to 
end  the  alliance.  Reed  almost  "got  away  with 
it"  himself.  But  this  is  not  leadership.  One 
does  not  follow  a  satirist.  One  makes  him  a 
privileged  character  at  most. 

Reed  and  Borah  are  privileged  characters  each  in 
his  own  way.  The  privilege  of  being  "queer  "  is 
as  old  as  the  herd  itself.  The  harmless  insane  man 
was  almost  sacred  in  primitive  society.  The 
"fool"  was  the  only  man  whose  disrespect  did  not 
amount  to  Use  majeste.  The  wisdom  of  the  "  fool " 
was  regarded  with  a  certain  awe  and  admiration. 
But  the  death  rate  among  those  who  sought  this 

199 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

franchise  must  have  been  high.  It  must  be  per- 
sonality which  decides  who  survives  and  achieves 
this  license  and  who  does  not,  a  nice  capacity  for 
adjustment,  a  rare  sense  of  what  the  crowd  will 
endure.  Borah  and  Reed  have  it,  LaFollette  has 
not  or  has  not  chosen  to  exercise  it. 

George  Moore  somewhere  says  that  if  you  can 
convince  a  woman  that  it  is  all  play,  all  Pan  and 
nymph,  between  you  and  her,  you  have  the  perfect 
way  of  a  man  with  a  maid,  when  his  aim  is  some- 
thing short  of  matrimony.  But  if  you  are  too 
serious  about  it — !  LaFollette  is  perhaps  too  seri- 
ous about  it.  If  he  could  have  said  what  he  had 
to  say  with  a  laugh  and  so  as  to  raise  a  laugh  he 
might  have  been  privileged  like  Reed,  or,  if  he  had 
to  be  serious,  he  should  have  been  serious  like 
Borah,  in  a  detached  and  impersonal  fashion;  then 
perhaps  he  might  still  have  been  something  less 
than  the  public  enemy  that  he  is.  But  LaFollette 
is  serious,  terribly  serious,  terribly  in  earnest.  He 
has  had  convictions,  clung  to  them,  and  probably 
suffered  more  for  them  than  any  man  in 
Washington. 

The  Wisconsin  Senator  is  one  of  the  least  under- 
stood men  in  public  life.  In  the  Senate  he  speaks 
violently,  with  a  harsh  voice  and  an  excess  of 
manner.  He  is  small  and  some  of  this  loudness 
and  emphasis  is  no  doubt  that  compensation  for 
lack  of  stature  and  presence  to  which  men  uncon- 
sciously resort;  some  of  it  is  an  exterior  which  has 

200 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

been  cultivated  to  cover  up  an  unusually  shy  and 
sensitive  heart.  The  character  in  history  and  fic- 
tion which  most  intrigues  him  is  Hamlet,  that  gentle 
soul  unfit  for  life.  He  has  spent  years  studying 
the  shy  Dane.  He  himself  is  a  Hamlet  who  has 
taken  up  arms  against  a  sea  of  troubles.  The 
"queer"  man  who  would  gain  a  franchise  for  his 
"queerness"  must  not  be  sensitive.  The  crowd 
likes  better  to  persecute  than  to  tolerate. 

Then  too  LaFollette  entered  the  Senate  when 
minorities  were  less  tolerable  than  they  are  today. 
He  got  the  stamp  of  impossible  when  Roosevelt 
led  a  movement  in  his  direction  and  he  refused  to 
be  a  part  of  it.  Thus  he  became  isolated,  neither 
Progressive  nor  Old  Guard.  You  can  not  safely  be 
too  uncompromising,  too  serious.  It  makes  no 
difference  if  you  were  right  in  rejecting  both 
wings  of  the  party  as  reactionary  which  they 
speedily  proved  to  be.  It  makes  no  difference  if 
you  were  right  in  opposing  the  war,  and  no  one  is  so 
sure  today  that  LaFollette  was  wrong  in  doing 
so  as  men  were  when  it  was  proposed  to  expel  him 
from  the  Senate.  Justification  after  the  fact  does 
no  good.  It  is  not  your  wrongness  that  they  hate; 
it's  your  uncompromising  quality,  and  that  re- 
mains more  unbreakable  than  ever. 

An  unusual  loyalty  explains  the  unwillingness  to 
compromise.  LaFollette  attaches  himself  deeply. 
A  characteristic  act  was  his  leaving  the  Senate  for 
months  to  nurse  a  sick  son  back  to  health.  It  sets 

201 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

him  apart  from  most  men,  who  do  not  let  sickness 
in  the  family  interfere  with  their  business  and  per- 
form their  full  duty  when  they  hire  a  trained  nurse. 
People  think  of  LaFollette,  the  public  man,  as  an 
egoist  but  this  nursing  of  his  son  showed  the  utmost 
absence  of  egoism.  And  so  it  is  with  all  his  intimate 
relations,  which  are  unusually  sweet  and  tender. 

Whatever  he  is  like  privately,  publicly  he  is 
placed,  rated,  catalogued;  the  general  mind  is 
made  up.  The  farm  bloc  no  more  turned  to  him 
than  to  Borah  for  leadership.  He  will  always 
remain  isolated. 

Now  that  party  discipline  has  been  broken  down, 
what  nonconformist  Senators  suffer  most  from  is 
the  tyranny  of  the  teapot.  Senator  Kenyon  re- 
ferred to  it  when  he  said  Newberry  on  trial  for  fit- 
ness for  his  seat  "  floated  back  into  the  Senate  on  an 
ocean  of  tea."  An  unparliamentary  version  of  the 
same  reference  to  the  social  influence  is :  "  The  Sen- 
ate is  one  long  procession  of  dinners  and  hootch." 

If  you  are  regular  politically  you  are  regular 
socially.  Given  the  habit  of  voting  with  the 
crowd,  of  putting  others  at  ease  by  a  not  too  great 
display  of  intellect,  a  good  cook,  a  pre-war  cellar, 
and  a  not  impossible  wife,  and  you  belong  to  the 
Senatorial  middle  class,  the  new  rich  insurance 
agents,  lawyers,  miners,  and  manufacturers  who 
control  the  fate  of  the  socially  ambitious.  You 
may  not  be  invited  to  the  Wadsworths',  or  may  be 
seldom  asked  there.  But  you  are  accepted  by 

202 


THE  UPPER  HOUSE  BOOBOISIE 

what  Mencken  might  call  the  wealthy  "booboi- 
sie,"  the  circle  Mr.  Harding  frequented  before  he 
was  advanced  to  the  White  House. 

If  you  don't  you  are  of  the  Senatorial  proletariat. 
You  are  invited  out  seldom  or  not  at  all.  You 
have  to  organize  a  little  set  of  intellectuals,  not 
found  in  the  Senate,  for  your  wife's  tea  parties. 

Senator  Kenyon  was  a  moderate  nonconformist. 
Intellectually  he  was  honest,  but  not  strong,  so 
that  an  outsider  might  have  thought  that  his  hon- 
esty and  independence  would  be  overlooked.  But 
he  was  never  accepted  by  the  "booboisie."  He 
was  virtually  cold  shouldered  out  of  the  Senate,  for 
it  was  with  immense  relief  that  he  escaped  from 
teapot  ostracism  to  the  securer  social  area  of  the 
Federal  bench. 

I  repeat  a  bit  of  gossip  about  the  Iowa  Senator 
without  vouching  for  it.  When  he  was  retiring,  it 
is  said,  a  reporter  asked,  "  What  can  be  done  with 
the  Senate?"  "Nothing,"  replied  the  lowan, 
"The  only  thing  to  do  is  to  destroy  it."  If  he  said 
this  he  really  flattered  the  "booboisie."  Destruc- 
tion is  reserved  for  wicked  things  like  Sodom  and 
Gomorrah.  But  the  Senate  is  not  wicked.  It  is 
good,  honest  in  the  sense  of  not  stealing,  well- 
meaning,  timid,  petty,  tea-drinking,  human, 
commonplace.  You  can't  destroy  it  unless  you 
have  something  to  put  in  its  place,  and  there  is 
nothing.  Much  better  turn  it  over  to  the  blocs 
and  see  what  they  will  do  with  it. 

203 


CHAPTER  XI 

A  PEAK  OF  REALITY  THRUSTS  UP  ON  THE  LEVEL 
PLAIN  OF  SHAMS 

As  well  fear  blocs  and  minorities  as  fear  the 
centrifugal  force  on  the  ground  that  it  is  seeking  to 
pull  us  off  the  face  of  the  earth.  Minorities  are  the 
centrifugal  force  of  politics.  They  maintain  the 
balance  of  forces  which  makes  political  existence 
possible.  Without  them  the  State  would  become 
unbearable;  it  would  destroy  us  or  we  should  be 
compelled  to  destroy  it. 

We  have  just  passed  through  a  period,  the  war, 
in  which  minorities  were  suppressed,  in  which  the 
general  will  brooked  no  resistance,  in  which  the 
bodies  of  men  between  certain  ages  and  the  minds 
of  men  and  women  of  all  ages  were  brought  into 
compulsory  service  of  the  State.  The  mental 
draft  dodger  went  to  jail  just  as  much  as  the  physi- 
cal draft  dodger. 

A  Chief  of  an  Industrial  Workers  of  the  World 
Longshoremans'  Union  was  sentenced  for  twenty 
years  because  he  was  an  I.  W.  W.,  although  under 
his  direction  his  organization  handled  efficiently 

204 


A  PEAK  OP  REALITY 

all  the  munitions  of  war  shipped  from  Philadelphia. 
He  "obstructed  the  war"  by  his  thoughts  as  an 
I.  W.  W.,  even  though  his  actions  as  a  citizen 
contributed  to  success  in  the  war. 

One  may  tolerate  during  a  national  emergency 
the  oppression  that  results  from  the  crushing  of 
minorities,  but  in  time  of  peace  it  is  only  in  the 
balance  of  political  forces  that  political  existence 
may  go  on. 

All  freedom  is  the  work  of  minorities  and  so  is  all 
change.  Respect  for  opinion  is  dearly  bought  by 
them.  Majority  views  were  all  once  minority 
views.  Some  political  theorists  even  go  so  far  as  to 
say  that  all  governments,  no  matter  what  apparent 
precautions  are  taken  to  represent  majorities,  are 
really  conducted  by  minorities.  Without  the 
effective  resistance  of  minorities  the  general  will 
may  become  tyrannous  or  without  the  stimulus 
they  afford  it  may  become  inert. 

The  blocs  and  minorities  that  are  appearing  in 
American  public  life  are  accomplishing  a  measure 
of  decentralization.  The  highly  centralized  govern- 
ment which  we  recently  built  up  is  itself  passing 
into  the  control  of  the  various  economic  sub- 
divisions of  society.  In  them  rather  than  in  it  is 
coming  to  be  final  authority. 

Take  freight  rates  for  an  illustration.  Originally 
they  were  localized,  in  the  unrestricted  control  of 
the  railroad  managers.  Then  they  were  slightly 
centralized  in  the  partial  control  of  state  and 

205 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

partial  control  of  national  authorities.  Then 
control  was  wholly  centralized  in  the  Inter-State 
Commerce  Commission  at  Washington,  the  States 
being  denied  effective  authority  even  over  rates 
within  their  own  borders. 

There  you  have  bureaucracy  at  its  worst,  author- 
ity in  the  hands  of  an  appointive  commission, 
thousands  of  miles,  in  many  cases,  from  the  place 
where  it  was  applied,  and  a  public  feeling  its  im- 
potence, which  is  the  negation  of  self-government. 

Then  comes  the  first  step  in  decentralization. 
No  locality,  no  State  was  big  enough  to  reach  out 
and  get  back  the  authority  over  its  own  railroad 
service  that  it  once  had.  But  the  organized  fanners 
of  the  whole  country  were  able  to  take  into  their 
hands  the  power  over  the  railroads  as  it  affected 
them.  Nominally  the  Inter-State  Commerce  Com- 
mission still  makes  rates.  Practically  the  farmers, 
having  the  balance  of  power  in  the  House  and 
Senate,  say  what  rates  they  want  on  agricultural 
products  and  get  them.  That  is  decentralization. 

The  division  into  States  which  the  jealous  colon- 
ists preserved  in  forming  the  Union  has  largely 
lost  its  significance.  Men  divide  now  according 
to  their  interests,  not  according  to  boundaries  that 
may  be  learned  in  the  school  geographies.  As  the 
States  weakened  many  of  their  powers  gradually 
tended  to  be  centralized  in  the  national  govern- 
ment. As  the  newer  economic  subdivisions  of 
society  become  organized  and  self-assertive  some 

eo6 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

of  the  power  thus  centralized  in  Washington  de- 
volves upon  them,  not  legally  or  formally,  but 
actually  and  in  practice.  They  constitute  minori- 
ties too  large  to  be  denied. 

It  is  only  through  decentralization  that  popular 
institutions  can  be  kept  alive,  only  through  it  that 
government  remains  near  enough  to  the  people  to 
hold  their  interest  and  only  through  it  that  freedom 
from  an  oppressive  State  is  preserved. 

Why  should  minorities  be  regarded  with  such 
aversion?  Why  should  President  Harding  de- 
claim against  them  so  persistently?  Our  Federal 
Constitution  is  written  full  of  safeguards  for  minori- 
ties. The  reservoir  of  power  is  in  the  minorities, 
the  States,  the  local  subdivisions  which  feared  the 
loss  of  their  identity  and  independence  through 
the  central  government  they  were  creating. 

Only  powers  expressly  yielded  by  the  local  units 
may  be  assumed  by  the  Republic.  The  States 
were  the  minorities;  they  felt  when  they  joined  the 
Union  that  their  rights  as  minorities  had  to  be 
jealously  guarded,  in  order  that  they  might  have 
the  realities  of  self-government. 

You  have  in  the  rule  that  the  small  State  must 
have  as  many  Senators  as  the  large  State  a  sharp 
assertion  of  the  right  of  geographical  minorities. 
If  the  larger  States  had  not  accepted  this  principle 
the  smaller  States  would  never  have  joined  the 
Union. 

Gradually  these  geographical  minorities  lost 

207 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

their  importance  in  the  public  consciousness.  Our 
people  had  come  and  kept  coming  to  this  country 
from  the  ends  of  the  earth.  Arriving  here  they 
continued  to  be  nomads,  sweeping  over  the  West 
in  search  of  new  pasture  lands  or  more  fertile  soil, 
moving  from  the  farm  to  the  city  and  thrusting 
their  roots  in  nowhere.  No  difference  of  language 
or  customs  set  up  arbitrary  frontiers. 

Moreover  we  were  the  first  people  to  settle  a 
land  where  modern  methods  of  locomotion  de- 
stroyed the  use  and  wont  of  limited  localities. 
Instead  of  being  citizens  of  New  York  united  with 
the  citizens  of  New  Jersey,  Connecticut,  and  the 
rest  of  them  for  the  common  defense,  as  our  fore- 
fathers imagined,  we  became  citizens  of  the  United 
States,  which  was  divided  into  New  York,  New 
Jersey,  Connecticut,  and  the  rest  for  purposes  of 
policing,  road-making,  and  other  functions  that 
could  be  better  managed  at  home  than  from 
Washington. 

A  State  began  to  assume  about  the  same  place  in 
the  Union  that  a  county  does  in  a  State. 

The  basic  reality  for  our  forefathers  was  the 
State,  the  Union  existing  for  the  convenience  of  the 
States.  The  basic  reality  for  us  is  the  Union,  the 
States  existing  for  the  convenience  of  the  Union, 
which  is  too  vast  to  administer  everything  from  a 
central  point. 

As  the  geographical  subdivisions  lost  their  signi- 
ficance economic  subdivisions  rose  to  take  their 

208 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

place.  The  farmer  of  Kansas  began  to  have  more 
in  common  with  the  farmer  of  Iowa  than  he  had 
with  the  coal  miner  of  his  own  State.  The  nation- 
wide organization  of  farmers  resulted,  and  it  is  a 
more  real  unit  in  the  political  consciousness  than 
is  that  unit  on  which  the  Fathers  laid  such  stress, 
the  State.  It  is  a  minority  that  has  no  reserve 
rights  under  the  Constitution  but  which  achieves 
its  rights  by  force  of  numbers  and  organization. 

These  economic  subdivisions  are  the  reality 
today.  The  United  States  is  a  union  of  the  State 
of  Agriculture,  the  State  of  Labor,  the  State  of 
Manufacturing,  and  a  dozen  other  occupational 
States  of  greater  or  less  importance.  And  after  all 
why  should  not  Agriculture,  Manufacturing,  Labor, 
Foreign,  and  Domestic  Commerce  form  a  union  for 
the  national  defense,  carefully  reserving  essential 
powers  to  themselves  as  States,  just  as  the  thirteen 
original  colonies  did?  Why  should  we  let  this  new 
political  organism  keep  us  awake  nights? 

Nationally  we  have  a  complex  on  the  subject  of 
disunion.  Fortunate  perhaps  is  the  country  which 
is  subject  to  the  pressure  of  a  foreign  enemy 
on  its  border,  as  France  is,  for  example,  to  that  of 
Germany.  If  you  have  a  convenient  foe  to  be 
afraid  of  you  do  not  have  to  be  afraid  of  yourselves. 
It  seems  to  be  the  rule  that  nations  like  individ- 
uals must  have  fears  and  the  American  phobia  is 
that  this  country  will  proceed  amoeba-wise  by 
scission,  into  several  countries.  When  we  feel  a 
14  209 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

weakening  at  the  center  we  feel  a  horror  in  the 
peripheries. 

We  fought  one  great  war  to  prevent  a  breaking 
up  of  the  Union  and  whenever  we  hear  the  word 
"  section, "  we  become  apprehensive.  And  just  as 
"  section "  fills  our  minds  with  fear  of  cleavage 
upon  geographical  lines,  so  "class"  arouses  anxiety 
over  cleavage  upon  social  lines.  "Class"  calls  up 
the  spectre  of  socialism.  "Bloc"  moreover  is  a 
word  of  unhappy  associations.  It  brings  into  the 
imagination  Europe  with  all  its  turmoil  and  its 
final  catastrophe. 

The  Civil  War  left  us  with  one  complex.  The 
European  War  left  us  with  another.  The  agricul- 
tural bloc  touches  both,  suggesting  division  and 
upon  European  lines.  Being  agricultural  it  is 
vaguely  sectional;  being  the  projection  of  a  single 
interest  into  national  politics  so  as  to  cut  across 
parties,  it  follows  European  precedents.  It  more- 
over derives  its  name  from  abroad. 

Call  it  log-rolling  by  the  farmers,  however,  and  it 
relates  to  the  habitual  method  of  American  legisla- 
tion. It  conforms  to  our  best  traditions.  We 
never  spoke  of  the  groups  which  filled  pork  barrels 
of  the  past  as  blocs,  but  every  river  and  harbor 
bill  was  the  work  of  minorities  uniting  to  raid  the 
treasury.  The  two  recent  amendments  to  the 
Constitution,  granting  the  suffrage  to  women  and 
prohibiting  the  manufacture  and  sale  of  alcoholic 
beverages,  were  also  achieved  minorities. 

210 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

The  organized  minorities  of  the  past  dissolved 
when  their  end  was  obtained.  They  had  a  specific 
rather  than  a  general  purpose.  Usually  it  was  a 
moral  purpose,  the  prohibition  of  alcoholic  drinks, 
or  political  justice  for  woman.  Never  until  recently 
did  a  minority  raise  the  economic  interests  of  one 
section  of  society  against  those  of  the  rest  of  society 
and  promise  to  keep  on  raising  them.  The  farm 
bloc  is  the  first  permanent  economic  minority  to 
organize  itself  effectively  for  political  action. 

The  phenomenon  is  not  that  the  bloc  impairs 
our  political  system;  it  does  not;  majority  rule  is 
always  tempered  by  minority  rule  or  it  becomes 
either  a  tyranny  or  a  dead  thing.  It  is  that  it 
threatens  our  pocketbooks.  It  obtains  low  rail- 
road rates  on  farm  products.  It  shifts  taxes  from 
farmers  to  the  rest  of  us.  It  secures  for  farmers 
special  aid  in  the  form  of  government  credits. 

Nevertheless  its  appearance  is  the  most  hopeful 
sign  in  Washington  that  we  may  emerge  from  the 
governmental  bog  into  which  we  have  sunk.  We 
had  centralized  to  the  point  of  creating  an  immense 
and  dull  bureaucracy  headed  by  a  weak  Executive 
and  equally  weak  Congress .  Interest  in  self-govern- 
ment was  being  destroyed  by  the  mere  remoteness 
and  irresponsiveness  of  the  mechanism.  "The 
parties  are  exactly  alike.  What  difference  does  it 
make  which  is  in  power  ?" 

We  had  created  an  organization  too  vast  for  any 
one  to  take  it  in  hand.  And  the  only  remedy  in 

211 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

that  case  is  to  break  the  organization  down.  De- 
centralization into  States  was  impossible,  for  men 
never  go  back  to  outworn  forms,  and  State  boun- 
daries had  ceased  to  be  the  real  lines  of  division  in 
American  society.  A  way  out  of  this  difficulty 
has  been  found  through  the  seizing  of  power  by 
occupational  organizations,  of  which  the  farm  bloc 
is  the  most  famous  and  most  successful. 

We  could  not  go  on  as  we  are,  with  an  enfeebled 
Executive  and  an  enfeebled  Congress.  And,  if  I 
have  analyzed  the  situation  correctly,  we  shall  have 
no  more  strong  Executives,  until  some  national 
emergency  unites  the  people  temporarily  for  the 
accomplishment  of  some  single  purpose.  The 
Executive  is  the  greatest  common  divisor  of  a 
diverse  society.  Congress,  equally,  is  weak  so 
long  as  it  remains  a  Congress  based  upon  the 
present  theory  of  party  government,  for  the  party 
has  to  be  stretched  out  too  thin,  has  to  represent 
too  many  different  views  to  have  character  and 
purpose.  Steadily  parties  are  being  driven  more 
and  more  to  pure  negation.  Wilson  was  elected 
the  first  time  on  the  negative  issue,  "No  more 
Roosevelt  and  his  radicalism, "  and  the  second 
time  on  the  negative  issue,  "He  kept  us  out  of 
war,"  and  Harding  upon  the  negative  issue,  "No 
more  Wilson." 

If  the  two  existing  parties  cannot  be  positive 
and  constructive,  "Why  not  scrap  them  both?" 
asks  Mr.  Samuel  G.  Blythe.  Why  not,  indeed? 

212 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

except  for  the  fact  that  you  can  find  no  principle 
upon  which  to  found  a  third  party.  If  there  were  a 
positive  principle  upon  which  a  majority  of  the 
voters  would  agree  the  existing  parties  would  grab 
for  it.  They  are  colorless  and  negative  not  by 
choice  but  by  necessity. 

Let  us  look  at  the  situation.  The  public  is  dis- 
gusted with  the  existing  parties  and  becoming 
indifferent  to  the  possibilities  of  the  suffrage  and  of 
popular  government,  an  unhealthy  sign.  A  new 
party  is  out  of  the  question,  for  to  succeed  any  new 
party  must  be  broad  enough  to  cover  all  sorts  and 
conditions  of  men,  divergent  groups  and  interests. 
It  must  at  once  have  the  defects  of  the  old  parties. 

So  long  as  parties  "must  be  careful/'  to  quote 
Mr.  Harding,  executives  must  "be  careful"  and 
Congress  organized  on  the  party  basis  "must  be 
careful."  We  gravitate  toward  negation. 

We  face  in  government  perhaps  what  it  is  said 
we  face  in  industry  and  in  war,  organization  on 
such  a  scale  that  men  are  no  longer  masters  of  it. 
Under  such  circumstances  there  is  nothing  to  do 
but  to  break  it  up  into  its  component  parts.  That 
is  what  the  group  or  bloc  system  is,  a  resolution 
into  component  parts. 

It  is  precisely  what  will  happen  in  the  industrial 
field  if  the  great  combinations  of  twenty  years  ago 
prove  too  unwieldy.  The  vertical  trust,  the  single 
industry,  organized  like  the  Stinnes  group  or  like 
the  Henry  Ford  industry  from  the  raw  material 

213 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

to  the  finished  product  but  seeking  no  monopoly, 
promises  to  take  the  place  of  the  horizontal  trust  of 
monopolistic  tendency.  The  bloc  is  a  vertical 
organization  appearing  in  the  field  of  politics, 
which  hitherto  has  been  dominated  by  the  horizon- 
tal organization  of  the  parties. 

A  vertical  organization,  like  everything  vertical 
in  this  world,  tends  to  rest  upon  the  solid  earth. 
It  has  its  base  in  reality.  The  bloc  introduces 
reality  into  public  life.  It  will  be  represented  by 
men  who  are  not  ashamed  to  stand  frankly  for  the 
selfish  interests  of  their  group. 

When  we  banished  selfish  interests  from  the 
government  a  few  years  ago  we  banished  all  in- 
terests— and  even  all  interest,  too — leaving  very 
little  but  hypocrisy  and  timidity.  The  representa- 
tives of  a  group  will  not  have  to  be  all  things  to  all 
men  as  our  party  men  are,  but  only  one  thing  to 
one  kind  of  men. 

If  we  cannot  get  our  present  parties  to  stand  for 
anything,  if  for  the  same  reason  we  cannot  form  a 
new  party  to  stand  for  anything,  we  can  at  least 
introduce  principles  into  politics  through  the  force 
of  group  support.  Blocs  will  be  positive,  not 
merely  negative  as  the  parties  have  become.  They 
do  not  have  to  please  everybody.  They  can  and 
must  be  constructive. 

The  clash  of  ideas  which  we  miss  between  parties 
may  take  place  between  blocs.  I  am  assuming,  as 
everyone  in  Washington  does,  that  the  farm  bloc 

214 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

is  only  a  forerunner  of  other  similar  political  efforts, 
for  every  economic  interest  which  is  organized 
among  the  voters  may  extend  itself  vertically  into 
Congress. 

There  will  be  a  gain  in  decentralization,  there  will 
be  a  gain  in  honesty,  there  will  be  a  gain  in  con- 
structive political  effort  through  the  direct  repre- 
sentation of  the  real  interests  of  society  in  Congress. 

Nor  does  there  appear  any  danger  of  the  break 
up  into  utterly  unrelated  minorities  such  as  has 
taken  place,  let  us  say,  in  France  and  Germany. 
We  have  what  most  European  countries  has  not, 
an  elected  Executive  who  plays  an  important  part 
in  legislation,  the  President  with  his  veto  power. 
So  long  as  the  presidential  office  retains  this  func- 
tion, and  it  is  always  likely  to  retain  it,  there  must 
be  national  parties  within  which  the  minorities, 
interests,  or  occupational  groups,  must  cooperate. 

Groups  will  not  be  able  in  this  country  as  in 
Europe  to  elect  members  of  the  national  legislature 
independently,  then  form  a  combination  and  pick 
their  own  Executive.  They  are  under  compulsion 
to  elect  the  Executive  at  large  by  the  votes  of  the 
whole  people;  they  must  hold  together  enough  for 
that  purpose. 

The  centrifugal  tendency  of  minorities  in  the 
American  system  is  thus  effectively  restrained. 
Groups  must  work  within  the  parties,  as  the  agri- 
cultural bloc  has  done  and  as  the  proposed  liberal 
workers  bloc  promises  to  do.  A  handful  of  seats 

215 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

in  Congress  alone  is  not  worth  fighting  for:  that  is 
why  all  third  party  movements  have  failed.  A 
handful  of  seats  in  a  European  parliament  is  worth 
having;  it  may  dictate  the  choice  of  the  Executive; 
that  is  why  parties  are  numerous  abroad.  In 
other  words  "bloc"  is  a  useful  name  as  indicating 
a  radical  departure  in  our  political  system  but  it 
contains  no  threat  for  this  country  of  the  political 
disintegration  prevailing  in  Europe. 

The  names  Republican  and  Democrat  are  likely 
to  last  as  convenient  designations  of  the  accord 
reached  for  national  purposes  between  the  vertical 
organizations  which  represent  economic  or  other 
group  interests  of  the  people.  Unity  is  thus  pre- 
served as  well  as  diversity,  which  is  what  upon 
geographical  lines,  the  Father  of  the  Constitution 
sought. 

You  have  only  to  regard  the  agricultural  bloc 
to  perceive  the  truth  of  this  analysis.  Primarily 
its  members  are  Republicans  or  Democrats  and 
only  secondarily  representatives  of  agriculture. 
They  have  rejected  leadership  of  a  separatist 
tendency,  choosing  the  moderate  guidance  of  Mr. 
Kenyon  and  Mr.  Capper  rather  than  the  more 
individualistic  generalship  of  Mr.  Borah  or  Mr.  La 
Follette.  Some  day  their  successors  may  be 
primarily  representatives  of  agriculture  and  only 
secondarily  Republicans  or  Democrats,  but  in  one 
of  the  two  big  parties  they  must  retain  their  stand- 
ing, or  share  the  fate  of  third  parties,  a  fate  made 

216 


SENATOR   ARTHUR    I.    CAPPER   OF    KANSAS 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

inevitable  by  the  necessity  electing  of  a  chief 
executive  at  large. 

When  the  farmer  votes  for  legislators  who  will 
represent  primarily  the  farm  interest,  and  the 
laborer  for  legislators  who  will  represent  primarily 
the  labor  interest  and  the  business  man  for  legisla- 
tors who  will  represent  the  business  interests  self- 
government  will  assume  a  new  importance,  even 
though  all  of  these  interests  will  have  to  be  sub- 
ordinated to  the  general  interest  for  the  sake  of 
cooperation  with  a  party  in  the  choice  of  an 
Executive. 

I  have  compared  the  group  organization  to  the 
vertical  trust  of  the  industrial  world.  The  re- 
semblance is  striking.  Take  the  instance  of  Herr 
Stinness,  the  most  interesting  figure  in  manufac- 
turing today.  Originally  he  was  a  coal  mine  owner. 
Instead  of  spreading  laterally  to  monopolize  coal 
he  builds  upward  from  his  raw  material  to  finished 
products.  He  adds  iron  to  his  holdings  and  manu- 
factures electrical  supplies  and  electricity.  He 
owns  his  own  ships  for  the  carrying  of  his  products. 
He  would  buy  railroads  from  the  German  govern- 
ment for  the  transporting  of  them.  He  owns 
newspapers  for  political  action.  And  the  whole  or- 
ganization culminates  with  himself  in  the  Reich- 
stag, and  in  international  relations  where  he  is 
almost  as  significant  a  figure  as  the  German 
government  itself. 

Mr.  Henry  Ford,  a  lesser  person,  started  at  the 

217 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

other  end  and  organized  downward  to  the  raw 
material.  He  now  owns  his  own  mines,  his  rail- 
roads for  shipping,  his  raw  material  and  products, 
his  steel  foundries,  the  factories  which  turn  out  his 
finished  products,  his  weekly  newspaper,  and  he  is 
himself  a  political  figure  of  no  one  yet  knows  how 
much  importance. 

The  farmers  are  organized  for  social  purposes, 
for  the  distribution  of  information  among  them- 
selves, for  cooperation  in  buying  and  selling,  for 
maintaining  a  lobby  at  Washington  and  finally  for 
political  action.  Political  action  crowns  an  or- 
ganization which  serves  all  the  purposes  for  which 
union  is  required. 

Practically  every  other  interest  is  organized  to 
the  point  of  maintaining  a  lobby  at  Washington. 
Only  the  farmers  have  developed  organization  in 
Congress.  Only  they  have  adapted  their  organiza- 
tion to  all  their  needs,  social  and  political.  Only 
they  have  the  perfect  vertical  trust  running  straight 
up  from  the  weekly  entertainment  in  the  union  or 
bureau  to  the  Senate  in  Washington,  where  their 
Senators  do  the  bidding  of  their  agent,  Mr.  Gray 
Silver. 

Indispensable  to  effective  special  interest  repre- 
sentation seems  to  be  an  organization  for  other 
than  political  purposes  which  brings  the  voters  of 
a  class  or  occupation  together.  Labor  has  such  an 
organization  in  its  unions.  Business  has  it  perhaps 
in  its  Chambers  of  Commerce  and  Boards  of  Trade. 

Ci8 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

Either  of  them  has  the  means  at  its  disposal  for 
imitating  the  farmers  and  developing  a  bloc  in  the 
national  legislature. 

It  is  natural  that  the  farm  interest  should  be  the 
first  to  push  its  way  beyond  the  lobby  or  propa- 
ganda stage  at  Washington  to  that  of  organized 
representation  on  the  floor  of  Congress.  Agricul- 
ture is  the  single  interest  or  the  immensely  pre- 
dominating interest  in  many  States.  A  Senator  or 
Representative  from  such  a  state  may  safely  con- 
sider himself  a  representative  of  agriculture.  But 
in  a  more  fully  developed  community  there  is  a 
diversity  of  interests.  Where  there  is  capital  there 
is  also  labor.  Moreover  most  of  the  industrial 
States  have  also  their  agricultural  interest.  It  is  not 
safe  for  an  Eastern  Senator  or  Representative,  as 
the  situation  now  stands,  to  identify  himself  with 
any  minority.  He  must  at  least  pretend  to  ' '  repre- 
sent the  whole  people." 

If  the  vertical  movement  in  politics  proceeds,  as 
it  almost  inevitably  must,  it  will  manifest  itself 
effectively  first  in  the  lower  house.  Congress 
districts  are  small  units.  In  an  industrial  State  one 
district  may  be  prevailingly  agricultural,  another 
prevailingly  labor,  another  prevailingly  commercial. 
Groups  operating  within  a  party  will  tend  to  parcel 
out  the  districts  among  themselves  holding  their 
support  of  each  other's  candidates,  as  the  Liberal 
and  Labor  parties  have  often  done  in  England. 

The  Senate  will  be  less  responsive.  States  are 

219 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

large  units  and,  except  in  farming  regions,  are  not 
prevailingly  of  one  interest.  But  a  division  may  be 
effected  like  that  which  now  gives  one  Senator  to 
the  eastern  and  another  to  the  western,  or  one  to 
the  urban  and  another  to  the  rural  part  of  the  State. 
One  Senator  may  go  to  business  and  another  to 
agriculture  or  to  labor  as  the  case  may  be. 

What  I  have  just  written  is  by  way  of  illustra- 
tion. I  have  spoken  of  agricultural,  labor  and 
business  blocs  not  because  these  are  the  only  divi- 
sions of  society  that  may  be  organized  for  political 
purpose  but  because  they  already  have  the  basic 
machinery  and  seem  certain  to  thrust  upwards 
till  they  are  prominently  represented  in  Congress. 
Other  minority  interests  are  already  showing 
themselves,  as  for  example  the  soldiers  of  the  late 
war  and  the  inland  waterways  group.  These  and 
others  like  them,  some  permanent  and  some 
temporary,  will  cut  across  the  main  subdivisions, 
so  that  men  who  are  divided  on  one  interest  will 
be  united  on  another  and  thus  furnish  a  further 
cement  in  the  body  politic  in  addition  to  the 
necessity  of  joint  action  upon  the  presidency. 

Thus  there  is  less  danger  of  our  being  ruled  by 
minorities  than  there  is  of  minorities  having  to 
surrender  too  much  of  their  purposes  for  the  sake 
of  unity  among  themselves  and  of  our  thus  being  in 
spite  of  their  organization  little  better  off  than  we 
are  now,  reduced  by  the  sheer  mass  that  has  to  be 
moved  to  a  policy  of  inaction  and  negation. 

220 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

In  an  earlier  chapter  I  analyzed  the  Senate  to 
show  how  weak  and  will-less  it  is  and  how  inferior 
is  its  personnel,  how  prostrate  it  lies  before  any 
powerful  minority  which  has  a  purpose  and  the 
will  to  carry  it  out.  I  used  the  Senate  as  typical  of 
Congress;  a  desire  to  save  space  and  to  avoid 
repetitions  kept  me  from  a  similar  study  of  the 
House.  In  the  same  way  the  parties  lie  ready  for 
the  uses  of  minorities.  They  are  will-less.  They 
have  no  aim  and  express  no  unity  because  when  the 
old  pioneer  will  to  exploit  as  quickly  as  possible 
the  national  resources  without  regard  to  waste, 
physical  or  social,  ceased  to  operate,  there  was  no 
unity,  except,  as  I  have  explained,  for  temporary 
purposes,  for  social  defense  under  Roosevelt  and 
for  national  defense  under  Wilson,  two  essentially 
negative  ends. 

Mr.  Will  H.  Hays  trying  to  tell  the  Republican 
senate  how  to  vote  on  the  League  covenant,  was  a 
less  powerful  figure  than  was  Mr.  Wayne  B. 
Wheeler  ordering  it  to  vote  that  more  than  one 
half  of  one  per  cent  of  alcohol  in  a  beverage  was 
intoxicating,  or  Mr.  Gray  Silver  forcing  it  to  extend 
credits  to  farmers,  or  Colonel  Taylor  frightening  it 
into  voting  for  a  soldiers  *  bonus. 

The  old  party  bosses  are  dead.  No  machine 
leader  will  control  as  many  delegates  in  the  next 
national  convention  as  will  Mr.  Gray  Silver.  So 
far  as  delegates  are  now  led  they  are  led  by  Sena- 
tors and  Representatives.  A  Senate  group  chose 

221 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Mr.  Harding  at  Chicago.  And  Senators  and  Repre- 
sentatives lie  at  the  mercy  of  organized  minorities. 

The  Republican  party  in  1920  was  an  agglomera- 
tion of  minorities,  held  together  by  no  better 
binder  than  the  negation  of  Wilsonism.  There 
were  the  German  vote,  the  Irish  vote  and  the  other 
foreign  votes;  the  farmer  vote,  the  business  vote, 
the  old  American  vote,  the  frightened  vote,  the 
herd  vote  and  every  conceivable  kind  of  vote.  It 
was  in  effect  a  bloc,  in  the  European  sense  of  that 
word,  a  combination  of  small  parties.  These 
minorities  were  mostly  unorganized  in  1920  or 
imperfectly  organized;  their  development  ver- 
tically is  now  going  on.  Some  of  them  will  appear 
as  definitely  upon  the  floor  of  the  1924  convention 
as  the  agricultural  group  has  upon  the  floor  of 
Congress. 

With  the  organization  of  minorities  Congress 
becomes  important,  for  it  is  in  Congress  that  the 
Fathers  in  their  wisdom  provided  for  the  expres- 
sion of  minorities.  The  Presidency,  according  to 
the  argument  used  before  in  this  book,  dwindles  to 
a  charming  embodiment  of  that  great  American  ne- 
gative— nation-wide  public  opinion.  The  only  or- 
dinarily available  positive — groupopinion — ftndsits 
play  in  the  Legislature.  There  will  be  determined 
upon  whose  shoulders  the  taxes  will  be  shifted, 
who  shall  have  effective  rebates  in  freight  rates, 
and  more  important  still,  who  shall  use  for  his 
group  interests  the  government  control  of  credit. 

222 


GREY    SILVER,    THE    MAN    BEHIND   THE    FARM    BLOC 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

Where  these  questions  are  being  decided  there 
public  attention  will  concentrate.  There  will  be 
the  stress  upon  government. 

As  Congress  becomes  more  important  better 
men  will  be  drawn  into  it.  There  will  be  a  gain  to 
public  life  in  this  country  from  emphasis  upon  the 
parliamentary  side  of  government.  As  it  is  now 
only  one  prize  in  American  politics  is  worth  while 
and  that  is  the  Presidency.  And  there  is  no  known 
rule  by  which  men  may  attain  to  it.  Candidates 
for  it  are  chosen  at  random,  from  governing  a  State, 
from  an  obscure  position  in  the  Senate,  from  the 
army,  it  may  be;  in  no  case  does  it  come  as  the 
certain  reward  of  national  service. 

And  if,  as  happened  when  Mr.  Roosevelt  and 
Mr.  Wilson  were  made  President,  really  able  men 
attain  the  office,  they  may  serve  their  country  only 
four  years,  or  eight  years  at  most,  and  then  must 
retire  from  view.  In  England,  for  example,  similar 
men  are  at  the  head  of  the  government  or  leading 
the  opposition  for  the  greater  part  of  a  lifetime. 
English  public  life  would  inevitably  look  richer 
than  ours  even  were  it  not  richer,  for  when  they 
breed  a  statesman  in  England  they  use  him  for 
years.  We  discard  him  after  four  or  eight  years. 
We  have  not  the  system  for  developing  statesmen 
and  when  by  chance  we  find  one  we  waste  him. 

We  put  our  faith  in  the  jack-of -all-trades  and  the 
amateur.  We  have  the  cheerful  notion  that  the 
''crisis  produces  the  man."  This  is  nothing  more 

223 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

than  the  justice  illusion  which  is  lodged  in  the 
minds  of  men,  an  idea,  religious  in  its  origin,  that 
no  time  of  trial  would  arrive  unless  the  man  to 
meet  it  were  benignantly  sent  along  with  it,  a 
denial  of  human  responsibility,  an  encouragement 
to  the  happy-go-lucky  notion  that  everything 
always  comes  out  right  in  the  end. 

The  world,  in  going  through  the  greatest  crisis 
in  history  has  controverted  this  cheerful  belief,  for 
it  has  not  produced  "  the  man  "  either  here  or  else- 
where. No  one  appeared  big  enough  to  prevent  the 
war.  No  one  appeared  big  enough  to  shorten  the 
war.  No  one  appeared  big  enough  to  effect  a  real 
peace.  And  no  one  appeared  big  enough  to  guide 
this  country  wisely  either  in  the  war  or  in  the 
making  of  peace,  which  is  still  going  on. 

Only  in  parliamentary  life  is  there  enough  per- 
manency and  enough  opportunity  for  the  breeding 
of  statesmen.  We  shall  never  have  them  while  the 
Presidency  with  its  hazards  and  its  wastes  is 
stressed  as  it  has  been  in  recent  years. 

And  Congress  itself  must  be  reformed  before  it 
will  encourage  and  develop  ability.  The  seniority 
rule,  to  which  reference  has  been  made  before, 
must  be  abolished  before  talent  will  have  its  oppor- 
tunity in  the  legislative  branch. 

One  of  the  first  things  that  aggressive  minorities 
would  be  likely  to  do  is  to  reach  out  for  the  impor- 
tant committee  chairmanships.  Already  the  sen- 
iority rule  has  been  broken  in  the  House,  when 

224 


A  PEAK  OF  REALITY 

Martin  Madden  was  made  Chairman  of  the  Appro- 
priations Committee  instead  of  the  senior  Republi- 
can, an  inadequate  person  from  Minnesota. 

And  in  any  case  the  seniority  rule  will  be  severely 
tested  in  the  Senate.  If  Senator  McCumber  is 
defeated  in  North  Dakota  and  Senator  Lodge  is 
defeated  or  dies,  Senator  Borah  will  be  in  line 
to  be  chairman  of  the  important  Foreign  Relations 
Committee.  When  Senator  Cummins,  who  is 
sick,  dies  or  retires  and  Senator  Townsend  is  de- 
feated, which  now  seems  likely,  Senator  LaFollette 
will  be  in  line  to  be  chairman  of  the  Senate  Com- 
mittee on  Interstate  Commerce.  Both  irregulars 
will  then  attain  places  of  vast  power  unless  the 
seniority  rule  is  abrogated. 

Thus  even  the  machine  in  the  Senate  will  soon 
be  under  pressure  to  do  away  with  the  absurd 
method  of  awarding  mere  length  of  service  with 
power  and  place. 

Minorities  when  they  determine  to  take  the 
Senate  and  the  House  out  of  the  enfeebled  grasp 
of  incompetent  regularity  will  inevitably  find 
precedents  already  established  for  them. 

A  richer  public  life  will  come  from  the  breakdown 
of  the  safeguards  of  mediocrity  and  from  the  stress- 
ing of  the  legislative  at  the  expense  of  the  executive 
branch  of  the  government.  Both  these  results  are 
likely  to  follow  from  the  effective  appearance  of 
minority  interests  in  Congress. 


25 


225 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE  HAPPY  ENDING 

I  HAVE  hesitated  a  long  time  over  writing  this 
last  chapter,  because  of  the  natural  desire  to  give 
to  my  book  a  happy  ending. 

One  may  write  critically  of  America  and  things 
American,  but  only  if  one  ends  in  a  mood  of  hope- 
ful confidence.  There  is  so  much  youth,  so  much 
latent  power  here,  that  one  cannot  fail  to  have 
faith  that  the  spirit  of  man  will  gain  some  enlarge- 
ment from  the  experiment  in  living  which  we  are 
carrying  on  in  this  country. 

And  even  if  that  were  not  true,  egotism  requires 
us  to  believe  that  we  are  ever  going  forward  to 
better  things ;  for  how  should  ' '  the  forces ' '  have  the 
effrontery  to  establish  so  splendid  a  people  as  our- 
selves upon  so  rich  a  continent,  while  reserving 
for  us  nothing  but  a  commonplace  career,  that  of 
one  of  the  many  peoples  who  have  from  time  to 
time  occupied  the  fairer  regions  of  the  earth? 

At  least  we  shall  fill  a  place  in  history  alongside 
Greece  and  Rome;  we  feel  it  as  the  imaginative 

226 


THE  HAPPY  ENDING 

young  man  feels  in  himself  the  stirrings  of  a  future 
Shakespeare,  Napoleon,  or  Lincoln. 

The  human  mind  refuses  to  conceive  of  so  much 
power  coming  to  ordinary  ends.  The  justice  illu- 
sion which  men  have  found  so  indispensable  a 
companion  on  their  way  through  time  requires 
the  happy  ending.  As  it  is  only  right  and  fair  that 
when  the  forces  send  us  a  crisis  they  should  send  us 
a  man  equal  to  it,  so  it  is  only  right  and  fair  that 
when  they  put  so  great  a  people  as  ourselves  in  the 
world  they  should  prepare  for  it  a  splendid  destiny. 

I  subscribe  heartily  to  this  doctrine.  It  is  as 
convincing  as  any  I  have  ever  seen  based  on  the 
theory  which  we  all  cheerfully  accept,  that  man  is 
not  master  of  his  own  fate,  that  he  does  not  need  to 
be,  that  he  had  better  not  be,  that  he  reaps  where  he 
does  not  sow,  reaps,  indeed,  abundant  crops. 

In  the  preceding  chapter,  working  toward  the 
happy  ending,  I  have  brought  my  characters  to 
the  verge  of  felicity:  the  perfect  union  between 
minorities  and  majorities,  which  is  the  aim  of  all 
social  order,  is  in  sight. 

I  have  based  my  minorities  upon  self-interest, 
thus  introducing  into  our  government  the  selfish 
interests  banished  therefrom  twenty  years  ago. 
Their  banishment  was  an  achievement  of  virtue. 
Their  reintroduction  is  the  accomplishment  of 
good  sense.  They  are  the  great  reality  while  the 
world  thinks  as  it  does. 

Since  someone  somewhere,  in  a  treatise  on 

227 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

economics  probably,  penned  the  phrase  "  enlight- 
ened self -interest, "  we  have  all  more  or  less  become 
enamored  of  the  idea  that  wisdom — enlighten- 
ment— reposes  in  the  bosom  of  selfishness.  Justice 
requires  that  wisdom  should  be  somewhere.  The 
reasoning  runs  like  this.  The  world  cannot  get 
on  without  wisdom.  Justice  demands  that  the 
world  should  get  on.  Therefore  there  is  wisdom  in 
the  world.  We  know  it  is  not  in  ourselves  or  in  our 
neighbors.  We  feel,  therefore,  that  it  must  be  in 
the  bosom  of  perfect  selfishness.  And  as  we  cast 
our  eyes  about  us  we  think  we  know  where  the 
bosom  of  perfect  selfishness  is,  and  we  feel  assured. 

Sometimes,  of  course,  we  place  it  in  the  heads  of 
all  mankind,  it  being  a  thing  that  no  one  man  has 
and  no  few  men  have,  but  which  is  one  of  those 
mysterious  properties  of  the  aggregate  which  does 
not  inhere  in  the  individuals  composing  the  aggre- 
gate; a  sort  of  colloidal  element  that  comes  from 
shaking  men  up  together,  though  all  are  without  it 
before  the  mixing  and  shaking. 

Some  would  place  it,  as  Mr.  Wilson  seems  to  in 
a  famous  passage  on  minorities,  in  the  breasts  of 
the  enlightened  few.  When  the  few  disagreed  with 
him,  he  threw  them  and  their  wisdom  in  jail. 

But  wherever  it  is,  it  is  sure  to  be  found  in  a 
system  which  preserved  the  old  parties  represent- 
ing the  general  mind  of  the  country  along  with  the 
new  vertical  political  organizations,  representing 
the  minorities,  thrusting  up  like  volcanoes  upon  the 

228 


THE  HAPPY  ENDING 

placid  plane  of  politics  that  Mr.  Harding  once 
delighted  to  survey. 

You  have  in  this  combination  the  spontaneous 
wisdom  of  the  masses,  if  that  is  where  wisdom 
generates.  You  have  the  wisdom  of  the  few,  if  you 
believe  in  impregnation  from  above,  and  you  have 
the  wisdom  of  selfishness,  if  you  believe  as  most  of 
us  do  in  the  enlightenment  of  self-interest.  And 
no  one  ever  located  wisdom  anywhere  else  than  in 
these  three  places,  for  the  first,  as  I  might  easily 
demonstrate,  is  the  modern  democratic  name  for 
the  wisdom  of  God;  the  second  is  the  wisdom  of 
men;  and  the  third  is  the  wisdom  of  the  serpent; 
beside  which  there  are  no  other  wisdoms. 

This  you  will  admit  is  moving  rapidly  and  with- 
out reserve  toward  the  happy  ending.  But  I  think 
every  writer  of  a  novel  has  stuck  his  tongue  in  his 
cheek  as  he  wrote  those  benedictory  words, "And 
they  lived  happy  ever  after."  And  I  stick  my 
tongue  in  my  cheek  as  I  think  of  Mr.  Gray  Silver, 
the  effective  director  of  the  farmers'  vertical  politi- 
cal trust  sitting  in  the  Senate,  leading  it  perhaps 
in  place  of  Senator  Lodge  of  Massachusetts. 

To  Mr.  Lodge's  petulant,  imperious  gesture — 
the  sharp  handclap  for  the  pages — would  succeed 
Mr.  Silver's  fixing  gesture,  that  of  a  country 
merchant  smoothing  out  a  piece  of  silk  before  a 
customer  at  a  counter.  Mr.  Silver  as  he  talks 
performs  one  constant  motion,  a  gentle  slow  moving 
of  both  hands  horizontally,  palms  down. 

229 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Mr.  Silver  is  a  lobbyist  with  the  powers  of  a 
dictator,  or  a  dictator  with  the  habits  of  a  lobbyist, 
whichever  way  you  wish  to  look  at  it.  A  former 
fanner,  member  of  the  West  Virginia  legislature, 
representative  of  farm  organizations  at  Washington, 
he  rules  the  Senate  with  more  power  than  Mr. 
Lodge  has  or  Mr.  Harding  has,  but  always  with 
the  gentle  touch  of  a  general-storekeeper,  spread- 
ing the  wrinkles  out  of  a  yard  of  satin. 

But  even  this  little  lobbyist  has  a  certain  definite- 
ness  which  public  men  generally  lack.  His  feet  are 
firmly  placed  upon  reality.  He  speaks  for  a  solid 
body  of  opinion.  He  is  a  positive  rather  than  a 
negative  force.  He  represents  a  fairly  united 
minority  which  knows  what  it  wants,  and  men 
are  strong  or  weak  according  as  they  are  or  are  not 
spokesmen  of  a  cause;  and  the  selfish  interest  of  a 
group  easily  takes  on  the  pious  aspect  of  a  cause. 

It  is  always  better  to  deal  with  principals  than 
with  agents.  Gray  Silver,  Colonel  John  H.  Taylor, 
the  Apollo  of  the  soldiers'  bonus  lobby,  perfect 
ladies'  man  in  appearance,  who  is  full  of  zeal  also 
for  a  cause,  that  of  those  who  did  not  make  money 
out  of  the  war  and  who  should  in  common  justice 
make  it  all  the  rest  of  their  lives  out  of  the  peace, 
and  Wayne  B.  Wheeler,  the  fanatic  leader  of  the 
drys,  are  all  more  real  men  than  those  who  do  their 
bidding  in  the  Senate  and  the  House. 

No,  if  I  put  my  tongue  in  my  cheek  as  I  write 
the  words  "lived  happy  ever  after, "  it  is  because 

230 


THE  HAPPY  ENDING 

I  see  only  a  measure  of  improvement  in  the  freeing 
of  men  from  existing  political  conventions  which 
will  come  from  the  effective  emergence  of  minorities. 
A  richer  public  life  will  result  from  increased 
vitality  of  the  legislative  branch.  But  a  rich  public 
life,  no ;  for  that  requires  men.  You  cannot  fashion 
it  out  of  Lodges,  Watsons,  Curtises,  Gillettes, 
Mondells,  Hardings,  Hugheses,  and  Hoovers,  or 
even  Gray  Silvers,  Taylors,  or  Wheelers. 

And  we  do  not  breed  men  in  this  country.  If  the 
test  of  a  civilization  is  an  unusually  high  average  of 
national  comfort,  achieved  in  a  land  of  unparalleled 
resources,  whose  exploitation  was  cut  off  from 
interruption  by  foreign  enemies,  then  this  experi- 
ment in  living  which  we  have  been  conducting  in 
America  has  been  a  great  success;  if  it  is  a  further 
freeing  of  the  human  spirit,  such  as  finds  its  ex- 
pression in  the  rare  individuals  who  make  up  the 
bright  spots  in  all  past  human  history,  then  its 
success  is  still  to  be  achieved. 

Many  blame  the  dullness  and  general  average- 
ness  which  afflicts  us  upon  democracy.  There  is 
democracy  and  there  is  timidity  and  stupidity; 
there  is  the  appeal  to  low  intelligence;  the  compul- 
sion to  be  a  best  seller  rests  upon  us  all.  Post  hoc 
propter  hoc. 

I  am  going  to  blame  it  upon  the  mistake  Euclid 
made  in  his  theorem  about  two  parallel  lines. 
This  was  an  error  of  Euclid's,  modern  mathematics 
proves,  unless  you  assume  space  to  be  infinite. 

231 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Having  committed  ourselves  to  Euclid,  we  com- 
mitted ourselves  to  a  space  that  was  infinite. 
Space  being  regarded  as  infinite,  man  was  little, 
relatively. 

Euclid  having  made  his  mistake  about  the 
parallels,  it  followed  inevitably  that  Mr.  Harding 
should  be  little. 

I  use  Mr.  Harding  only  by  way  of  illustration. 
You  may  fill  any  other  name  you  like  of  the  Wash- 
ington gallery  into  that  statement  of  inevitability 
and  do  it  no  violence.  And  this  very  interchange- 
ability  of  names  suggests  that  you  must  go  further 
back  than  democracy  to  find  the  cause  of  today's 
sterility. 

Besides,  we  have  had  infinite  space,  in  our  minds; 
but  have  we  ever  had  democracy  there?  De  Gour- 
mont  writes  that  no  religion  ever  dies,  but  it  rather 
lives  on  in  its  successor.  Similarly,  no  form  of 
government  ever  dies;  it  survives  in  its  successor. 
A  nation  does  not  become  a  democracy  by  writing 
on  a  bit  of  paper,  "resolved  that  we  are  a  democ- 
racy, with  a  government  consisting  of  executive, 
legislative,  and  judicial  branches  chosen  by 
majority  vote. " 

Government,  however  organized,  is  what  exists 
in  the  minds  of  the  people,  and  in  that  mind  is 
stored  up  a  dozen  superstitions,  handed  down  from 
primitive  days,  gathering  force  from  time  to  time 
as  new  names  are  given  to  them  and  new  "scien- 
tific" bases  are  found  for  them. 

232 


THE  HAPPY  ENDING 

We  laugh  at  the  divine  right  of  kings,  but  we 
could  not  accept  self-government  without  bestow- 
ing on  it  an  element  of  divinity.  We  have  the 
divine  right  of  Public  Opinion.  We  can  hardly 
print  these  words  without  the  reverence  of  capital 
letters.  The  founders  of  modern  democracy  knew 
there  could  be  no  government  without  a  miraculous 
quality.  Formerly  one  mere  man  by  virtue  of 
ruling  became  something  divine.  The  miracle 
grew  difficult  to  swallow.  You  could  regard  this 
one  man  and  see  that  he  was  a  fool  and  had  too 
many  mistresses.  He  was  the  least  divine-looking 
thing  that  could  be  imagined.  Very  well  then,  put 
the  divine  quality  into  something  remote.  All 
men  by  virtue  of  ruling  themselves  became  divine. 

An  immense  inertia  develops  between  theoretical 
self-government  and  the  practical  reluctance  of 
humanity  to  be  governed  by  anything  short  of  the 
heavenly  hosts.  I  don't  know  whether  this  re- 
luctance springs  from  racial  modesty,  the  feeling 
that  man  is  not  good  enough  to  govern  himself,  or 
from  racial  egotism,  the  belief  that  nothing  is  too 
good  to  govern  him ;  but  it  is  a  great  reality.  The 
little  men  at  Washington  are  will-less  in  the  conflict. 

To  overcome  this  inertia,  minorities  whose  in- 
terests cannot  wait  upon  the  slow  benevolent 
processes  of  determinism  or  upon  the  divine  right- 
ness  of  public  opinion,  form  to  prod  the  constitu- 
tional organs  of  government  into  action.  Mr. 
Gray  Silver,  the  silk  smoother,  and  Mr.  Wayne  B. 

233 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Wheeler,  the  Puritan  fanatic,  are  both  just  as  much 
parts  of  the  government  as  is  Mr.  Harding.  So, 
too,  is  every  one  of  the  hundred  and  more  lobbies 
which  issue  publicity  at  Washington.  We  recog- 
nize this  plurality  of  our  institutions  in  our  common 
speech.  We  refer  habitually  to  the  "  in  visible 
government/'  to  "government  by  business, "  to 
"party  government, "  to  "government  by  public 
opinion."  We  have  little  but  inertia,  except  as 
outside  pressure  is  applied  to  it. 

The  little  men  at  Washington  live  in  all  this 
confusion  of  an  excessively  plural  government. 
They  are  pushed  hither  and  yon  by  all  these  forces, 
organized  and  unorganized,  mental  and  physical, 
real  and  imaginary,  that  inhibit  and  impel  self- 
government.  They  lean  heavily  upon  parties  only 
to  find  parties  bending  beneath  their  weight.  They 
yield  to  blocs  and  lobbies.  They  watch  publicity 
and  put  out  their  own  publicity  to  counteract  it. 

Like  the  ministers  of  crowned  fools,  they  gull  the 
present  embodiment  of  divine  right  and  cringe 
before  it.  They  are  everything  but  the  effective 
realization  of  a  democratic  will. 

All  this  sounds  as  if  I  were  getting  far  from  my 
happy  ending,  and  you  begin  to  see  me  asking  the 
old  question,  "Is  democracy  a  failure? "  But  no, 
it  is  too  soon  to  ask  it.  Wait  a  thousand  years 
until  democracy  has  had  a  real  chance.  A  revolu- 
tion— no  really  optimistic  prognosis  can  be  written 
which  does  not  have  the  world  revolution  in  it — a 

234 


THE  HAPPY  ENDING 

revolution  will  have  to  take  place  in  men's  minds 
before  this  is  a  democracy. 

I  would  absolve  myself  from  the  taboo  of  this 
word.  Property  is  a  grand  form  of  clothes.  A 
property  revolution,  such  as  the  Socialists  recom- 
mend, would  be  little  more  important  in  setting 
men's  minds  free  for  self-government,  than  would 
putting  women  in  trousers  be  in  setting  women's 
minds  free  for  the  achievement  of  sex  equality. 

Some  German — I  think  it  was  Spengler — writing 
about  some  "Niedergang, "  I  think  it  was  of 
western  civilization — all  Germans  like  to  write 
about  Niedergangs — demonstrated  that  every  new 
civilization  starts  with  a  new  theory  of  the  universe, 
of  space  and  time.  That  is,  it  starts  with  a  real 
revolution. 

Well,  then,  here  is  the  true  happy  ending;  Ein- 
stein is  giving  us  a  new  theory  of  the  universe, 
knocking  the  mathematical  props  from  under 
infinity,  teaching  us  that  man  largely  fashions  the 
world  out  of  his  own  mind. 

Man  again  tends  to  become  what  the  old  Greek 
radical  called  him,  "The  measure  of  all  things." 
Once  he  is,  and  it  will  take  a  long  time  for  him  to 
admit  that  he  is,  there  may  be  a  real  chance  for 
democracy  and  for  the  emergence  of  great  indi- 
viduals, who  are  after  all  the  best  evidence  of 
civilization. 

You  see  the  happy  ending  is  Einstein  and  not 
the  farm  bloc. 

235 


BEHIND  THE  MIRRORS 

Meanwhile  we  have  the  farm  bloc,  one  sign  of 
vitality  amid  much  deadness,  a  reassertion  of  the 
principle  which  the  Fathers  of  the  Constitution 
held,  that  there  must  be  room  for  the  play  of 
minorities  in  our  political  system. 


END 


236 


Jt  Selection  from  the 
Catalogue  of 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 


Complete  Catalogues  sent 
on  application 


"An  instantaneous  success 


Mirrors   of  Washington 

Anonymous 

Octavo,         Portrait* 

It  does  to  our  great  and  near-great 
what  the  "gentleman  with  a  duster" 
did  to  eminent  Englishmen  in  "The 
Mirrors  of  Downing  Street."  It  tells 
painfully  plain  truths  about  the  per- 
sonalities of  those  in  whose  hands  our 
destinies  lie  or  have  lain.  It  is  search- 
ing in  its  analyses,  and  contains  four- 
teen discerning,  piercing,  sometimes 
satirical,  always  brilliant,  character 
studies.  "And,"  says  the  At  Y,  Eve. 
Post,  "it  contains  indiscretions  deli- 
cious enough  to  satisfy  the  most 
exacting."  14  portraits  and  14 
amusing  caricatures  by  Cesare. 


HARDING 

WILSON 

HUGHES 

HARVEY 

HOUSE 

HOOVER 

ROOT 

LODGE 

BORAH 

KNOX 

PENROSE 

LANSING 

BARUCH 

JOHNSON 


Chicago  Dally  News  i  "  We  recommend  it  because  it 
gives  a  startling  and  clear  picture  of  Washington's 
fourteen  great  political  figures  —  an  unusual  picture, 
quite  different  from  anything  we  have  had  thus  far  in 
American  critical  writing.  A  chuckling  expose  of  the 
good  and  bad  in  American  politics  •  .  .  succinct  word 
pictures,  penetrating  anecdotes  .  .  .  not  vicious  .  .  . 
gently,  with  a  charmingly  unobtrusive  sapiency,  the 
mysterious  pen  has  traced  the  ludicrous  outlines  of  the 
nation's  anointed.  .  .  .  The  book  should  be  read  by  all 
hands  and  all  parties.  It  is  not  partisan  .  .  .  the  sort 
of  education  which  may  be  acquired  once  in  a  lifetime." 


G.  P.  Putnam's  Son* 


From 
Harrison  to  Harding 

By 

Arthur  Wallace  Dunn 

Two  Volumes,  Illustrated 

These  volumes  present  a  dramatic  narrative  from  the  pen 
of  a  man  who  has  had  close  contact  with  national  affairs 
and  with  the  political  activities  of  the  time,  and  who  has 
had  intimate  association  with  the  men  making  history. 
The  author  has  been  behind  the  scenes  and  has  secured 
personal  knowledge  in  regard  to  the  inside  influences  that 
have  controlled  political  action  and  have  shaped  the  policies 
of  the  nation.  His  narrative  is  elucidated  with  stories  of 
the  statesmen  and  other  political  leaders  of  the  period 
which  give  an  illuminating  analysis  of  these  men  as  they 
appear  on  and  off  the  public  stage. 

The  past  third  of  a  century  has  witnessed  an  interesting 
procession  of  leaders  of  varied  characteristics,  men  who  have 
left  an  impression  on  the  history  of  the  times,  and  who 
have  had  a  part  in  making  or  marring  the  progress  of  the 
nation.  The  period  includes  eight  administrations  and  six 
Presidents, — Harrison,  Cleveland,  McKinley,  Roosevelt, 
Taft,  and  Wilson.  The  last  Chapter  brings  the  text  down 
to  date  with  the  entrance  to  the  White  House  of  President 
Harding. 

A  refreshing  feature  of  this  work  is  the  frankness  with 
which  the  author  has  been  able  to  write  about  statesmen 
and  political  parties.  There  is  in  his  series  of  pictures 
evidence  of  neither  fear  nor  favor  and  the  book  is  free  from 
partisanship. 


G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New  York  London 


THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  SANTA  CRUZ 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  DATE  stamped  below. 


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